Orion Jones

“For Miller the process of runaway sexual selection that gave rise to energetically wasteful ornaments like the peacock’s tail…is precisely what gives rise to Hummers and McMansions.”

At the 2014 Neuroimaging conference held this year in San Francisco, industry professionals exhibited the promises and risks of being able to track, download, and manipulate brain waves. 

Certainly among the postwar works, says Princeton University professor Peter Singer, is the notion that art challenges society’s prevailing norms. Oh, the irony.

In the wake of the Santa Barbara shootings, in which gunman Elliot Rodger video-recorded his own misogynistic outlook on life, a national conversation began about the state of women in society.

Industrial-scale maggot production has just begun but is already showing sings of promise. But will consumers accept maggot-fed meat on their plate?

The history of the liberal arts has created many different reasons why a diverse and well-rounded education is necessary, so encapsulating one clear reason is a very difficult task.

“We are free by nature because we can become free, in the course of our development. And this development depends at every point upon the networks and relations that bind us to the larger social world.”

A new way of thinking about our biology–or rather, a very old way–is essential if we are to collectively solve the existential problems that face humanity, says UC Berkeley physicist Fritjof Capra.

Today, scientists believe the stimulation can narrow the gap between when someone is introduced to a skill and when they master it and the motor skills it requires.

A German artist has taken some of Vincent Van Gogh’s genetic material and used it to regrow the ear he famously cut off during a psychotic episode in 1888.

The wage hike represents uncharted territory for American economists, who are accustomed to seeing wage increases account only for inflation. The $15 rate, however, makes real gains.

A new report out of the Pew Research Center asks–and answers–what the Internet of things will look like by 2025. Firstly, there will be a lot of things.

Female sharks do it, as do female komodo dragons, so is it possible for humans? Very likely yes, says Dr. Allan Pacey, a reproductive biologist at the University of Sheffield.

Students learn more by taking notes with pen and paper than they do on a laptop, according to research done on campuses at UCLA and Princeton.

The importance of having an active father throughout a child’s life should not be diminished by his secondary role in giving birth or by his traditional absence from daytime home life due to work obligations.

Toxic chemicals affect developing brains much more severely than they do adult brains, and researchers now recognize that the months spent in the womb are the most crucial time for brain development.

The post-recession workforce is threadbare. Increased competition as well as additional professional expectations have created a wide net of disinterested employees throughout the United States.

Google’s prototype for a completely automated car radically changes the driving experience from actively controlling the vehicle to removing even the option of steering, accelerating, or braking.

Just as automated assembly lines have replaced manual labor, the looming question for future economies is that of the labor market. How many of our current jobs will be replaced by machines? 

Teenage monkeys tended to drink more fermented sugar cane than their elders. Researchers hypothesize that older monkeys drink less because of “monkey politics”.  

Insight–that eureka moment when a new idea appears like a bolt from the blue–is the most essential characteristic of creativity. Without insight, there simply can be no creativity.

A new study from noted biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University has measured the rate at which species are currently going extinct and concludes that the plant is on the brink of a sixth massive extinction of plant and animal life.

In a five-year study of college women, sociologists found that the term “slut” is capable of changing meaning to accommodate the pernicious goal of controlling women and creating hierarchy.

After decades of searching, still no evidence for dark matter has emerged, and some scientists are ready to abandon ship.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has identified 96 food products currently on the shelves of US grocery stores which contain microscopic pieces of metal. Do you know what’s in your yogurt?

Turkey’s highest judicial authority has ruled that shutting down Youtube–a policy advocated by the current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan–is a violation of freedom of expression, a right guaranteed by the Turkish constitution.

Medical marijuana has been legal in Canada for the past decade so its national government is well ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding effective regulation.

Technology innovator Stephen Wolfram argues that the universe may function less like a math equation and more like a computer program, demonstrating extremely complex behavior which could be based on relatively simple lines of natural code.

Recent studies disprove the cautionary tale of people’s lives going down the tube as a result of winning the lottery. 

For the all the hullabaloo that accompanied Deep Blue’s famous triumph over Russian chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov, there remains a strategy game at which humans remain undefeated.