Will Facebook’s up and coming messaging medium prove an important advancement in communication technology or just another step toward communication overload?
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How will the Giving Pledge, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s quest to get billionaires to donate half their wealth to charity, impact philanthropy and the world’s needy?
A sculpture nestled in the courtyard of C.I.A. headquarters contains four secret codes. To date, three have been uncovered, but the fourth remains a mystery.
An inventor believes he has solved the riddle of how to get humans exploring serious ocean depths previously too dangerous to investigate—by getting us to breathe liquid like fish.
Federal land conservation efforts are a failure and large swaths of the nation’s property should be turned over to the states, say Holly Fretwell and Shawn Regan at Forbes.
Wi-Fi may be killing trees. A study by a Dutch university suggests that Wi-Fi radiation causes strange abnormalities in trees and stunts the growth of other plants, such as corn.
Expertise might come with a dark side as all those learned patterns make it harder for us to integrate wholly new knowledge. Jonah Lehrer on why expertise is inflexible to new ideas.
When economists advise the government, their vision may be clouded by their own financial interests, say two University of Massachusetts professors.
Is history repeating itself? Professor of English Alan Jacobs draws parallels between the moral development of 18th century England and our own post-modern times.
Has 2010 been a watershed year for Western politics or just a continuation of the move towards a neoliberalised system? History professor Mark LeVine gives an answer.
Researchers at M.I.T. have taken a step toward replicating organs by discovering a way to make “building blocks” containing different kinds of tissue that can be put together.
Sorting out America’s fiscal mess is relatively simple. What’s needed is political courage. Tax code reform and spending cuts are essential, says The Economist.
As reassuring as that G.P.S. voice can be, you may want to turn it off next time you’re trying to find your way. It may be dumbing down a region of your brain.
A healthy “attention span” is just another ineffable quality to remember having, to believe you’ve lost, to worry about your kids lacking, to blame the culture for destroying.
Humans could be walking on Mars within the next couple decades, for only a fraction of the cost if explorers are given one-way tickets. It’s not a suicide mission, say cosmologists.
In an effort to translate the Bible, Protestant missionary groups have documented many endangered languages and now secular anthropologists are showing interest.
Legendary physicist Sir Roger Penrose says he has found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos that is refreshed by Big Bangs, of which there have been many.
The idea of empowering the public is a contradiction in terms: power is gained, not granted. When you ‘empower’ people, you’re not empowering them, you’re enfeebling them.
Smart phones. One can’t imagine life without them. Ah, the endless convenience: looking up a restaurant on Yelp, finding out a movie’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes, seeing that cute guy’s […]
What do you call it when corporations get together with politicians to work out the details of legislation? Normally, of course, it’s called “lobbying” and is subject to federal regulations […]
Many people who don’t develop dementia are nonetheless discovered after their deaths to have the brain lesions associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Do today’s college students define cheating differently? That’s the thesis of this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “Cheating and the Generational Divide.” The author claims that a […]
Scientists at CERN laboratory in Switzerland scored a major breakthough recently when they trapped atoms of anti-matter for the first time in history. Fans of Star Trek know the potential […]
Republicans are exploiting public outrage over whole body scanners and new invasive pat-downs to justify privatizing TSA screeners: As criticism grows of the government’s new full-body imaging scanners and the […]
Nothing like a good Nature paper to get the media’s attention, especially when it was about the biggest air traffic disruption in almost a decade. Of course, the headlines I […]
In a letter at the journal Science this week, my colleagues Ed Maibach and Tony Leiserowitz join with Tom Bowman, climate scientists, and other social scientists to issue a call-to-action […]
A new study from Ohio State researchers examines the impact of Al Jazeera on public opinion across Arab states, concluding that the news network strengthens Muslim identity among heavier viewers […]
Digital forces are threatening to weaken, or even destroy, the traditional basis, role and funding of the press. But what are the virtues it brings?
There seems no end in sight to Japan’s current decline, as jobs are lost, pensions cut, companies move overseas and social cohesion disintegrates.
Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.