Robby Berman
Contributing Writer
I’m a writer, musician, and father living in central New York with my wife, two daughters, one dog, two cats, and countless questions. I’m especially interested in animal rights, creativity, politics, the nature of things and time, and in making a worthwhile contribution. You can follow me @everyrobby.
A brain-computer music interface system allows four patients to compose their own string quartet.
An explanation of why clean coal is just fiction, or at best a climate-change denier’s fantasy.
Edward Slingerland offers two possible ways to sneak up on becoming effortless without making a direct effort to do so.
Christina Smolke, a brilliant Stanford scientist, has engineered yeast that can produce opiates without poppies.
Two billionaires are apparently funding research into how we can escape the simulation they believe we’re trapped in.
A second major California fault line has been found near the San Andreas Fault.
New research reveals the logic behind murder in old Icelandic Viking settlements.
Two strange Oliver Sacks stories about the mind and music from Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
An under-5-minute explanation of how you make a particle accelerators.
Our love affair with profanity may be cultural or it may be neurological.
A Yale study finds implicit racial bias in a study of 132 white and black preschool educators, but in different ways.
SONY Computer Science Labs has developed AI FlowComposer to write music.
A senior scientist from the SETI project imagines how we’ll react to inarguable evidence of an alien civilization.
Manu Prakash is one of the MacArthur Foundation’s 2016 Fellows, and here’s why.
Researchers at MIT have developed a system that can read a person’s emotions, even hidden ones, at a distance.
Three new studies suggest early modern humans migrated from Africa in one massive migration between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago.
Russian police arrest a robot canvassing humans at a political rally.
Super-recognizers are people with an extraordinary gift for remembering faces, and researchers are trying to find them.
Theoretical physicists may have arrived at an understanding that makes the pursuit of principles and laws through science meaningless.
How Costa Rica achieved 100% renewable energy, and what it means.
The strange origin of autocorrect during the development of an American secret Chinese computer.
A new study finds an innate correlation between words and the sounds they’re built from.
A gallery of high-quality images sent to earth by Curiosity Rover from Mars.
The reasons why the pain of a paper cut is so disproportionately high compared to its seriousness.
Looking at how our technology and culture compare to Star Trek’s vision of the future.
Apple’s removal of the iPhones 3.4 mm headphone jack is causing an uproar as part of technology’s inexorable march forward.
Researchers discover the ways in which spiders tune and play their webs as a way to control their worlds.
The President’s consideration and rejection of stating a no-first-strike policy puts the U.S. in a no-win position.
Scientists think they may understand why our brains produce false memories.
Hospitals are starting to get serious about just how noisy they can be for patients trying to heal.