European scientists who want to begin experimenting with geoengineering are being met with a host of concerns, including those of philosophers who worry about manipulating nature.
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An angelic lady from the pre-raphaelite school of femmes fatales is stretched across a map of Europe. Her raised hands clutch a sketch of the late-19th-century European rail network at two of […]
On Mother’s Day, in a sermon to his flock at the Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina, Pastor Charles Worley revealed his plan to rid America of its homosexuals: […]
As you may be aware, this past Sunday was Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, in which freethinkers are exhorted to draw pictures of Mohammed to reaffirm their right to free expression […]
The Boston Review is hosting a forum centered the claim of Michael Sandel, a Harvard political theorist, that “markets crowd out morals.” Sandel’s essay is well worth reading. He clearly gives voice to […]
With state and local governments still suffering from a persistent deficit of tax revenues due to the moribund economic recovery, smart politicians are looking ahead and lobbying for spaceport development […]
We’ve long been fascinated by the endless streams of data available in the world around us, and we especially love to try to make sense of them.
Are we somehow becoming “more than human”?
Kids, want to be an artist when you grow up? We’ve got a check-list for how to tell your parents. Parents, oh no, you accidentally raised an artist? Don’t despair: […]
Private company Space X successfully launched its unmanned Falcon 9 rocket into space early Tuesday morning from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Worldcrunch provided some fun facts […]
China has one billion mobile phone customers and in the next 12 months, 200 million people will purchase smartphones. That’s a big market for app developers, who also want better copyright protections.
Strange name for a movement, isn’t it; “The Right to Die”? Isn’t that like asking the government for “The Right to Live” or “The Right to Eat” […]
A pioneer of neurotheology, Dr. Andrew Newberg uses fMRI and other neuroscientific tools to study religious experiences in the brain. He has the rare distinction of having studied Franciscan nuns and Tibetan monks […]
What is the Big Idea? During his presidential campaign, François Hollande voiced his support for gay marriage and adoption for LGBT couples. He said he’d pursue the issue in 2013 if […]
New technology platforms and lingering job shortages mean volunteering will be increasingly motivated by self-interest. So is it still volunteering? Or should we not worry about defining it?
Are the financial markets rational? It’s a tough claim to make as share prices and bond yields zoom up and down during a single day, hour, or even second, sometimes […]
Andrew Cohen says narcissism is a culturally conditioned epidemic. How is it harmful and how can we break out of it?
Here’s a quite engaging and very sensible interview with Bennett Foddy on the possibilities for and the ethics of life extension. I would put this philosophy professor in the moderately […]
“My earliest memory is of anxiety!” cartoonist Daniel Clowes tells an interviewer in The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, the first serious monograph of the work of this seriously […]
Remember the 1960s? It was a decade so radical that even the President of the United States could publically declare that public funding of contraceptives would increase economic prosperity. Lyndon […]
While he does not do drugs himself, Penn Jillette also does not believe other people should go to jail for “victimless crimes,” pointing out that 1 in 6 people in prison in the U.S. today are “in there for weed.”
Big-idea start ups are not dead, says GigaOm’s Derrick Harris. They’ve just moved to the cloud, where scalable technology allows companies–and individuals–to innovate like never before.
I’ve always suspected, to paraphrase an adage from evolutionary science, that the marriage replicates the wedding. The wedding’s style is a germinal expression of the marriage to come, its strengths, […]
The preservation of individuals’ online profiles after their physical death extends their life in a very meaningful sense, says Australian philosopher Patrick Stokes.
A quiet suburban street set in the leafy suburbs of Cheadle, Manchester, Northern England on Monday, witnessed a coming together of a former Leader of Manchester City Council, Labour MP Graham Stringer […]
A new tech start up wants to use a mobile app to create a worldwide network for real-time language translation. Its creators say the system is the next-best thing to the singularity.
Congress is apparently now speaking at a 10th grade level. The Sunlight Foundation recentlyanalyzed the Congressional Record and found that the average member of Congress speaks at 10.6 grade reading level on the […]
The first thing that came to mind when I finished Predator Nation, the book by Charles Ferguson that explains how Wall Street’s elite brazenly commit financial crimes out in the […]
Facebook banked $16 billion on its initial public offering, so why are market analysts disappointed? Perhaps because the company threatens the dominance of the stock market itself.
On Tuesday, May 22, I will be delivering a lecture as part of the National Academies’ Sackler Colloquium on the “Science of Science Communication,” reviewing the role of the media […]