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If the question of life or death resides in the hands of a deity, then the death penalty is a sin against that god. Yet if it’s in our own hands, a woman deciding whether or not to bring a child forth should not be made to feel guilty, or worse, that she herself has sinned.

A new program out of Washington DC’s Public Library will attempt to answer some of the most important questions about personal privacy and security in America today, as well as show people how to use Tor.

A peek into the archives at the New York Public Library reveals the many (often zany) search queries lobbed at librarians in the pre-internet age.

Florida-based startup Magic Leap has been the talk of the tech world ever since securing a major grant from Google. Now it’s hired a respected sci-fi author to help guide their work.

Imagine standing in a bare room in which a small, 4-billion-year-old rock hangs from the ceiling by a thin wire as three vocalists whistle and breathe on it to make it swing. For some people, such a scenario might be the nightmare version of contemporary art run amok, so far “out there” that it’s never coming back. 

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

According to a story doing the rounds on social media, organ transplant patients can take on the personalities of their donors. Don’t believe the hype.

In 1923, a British survey team doodled an elephant on a map of a remote part of the Gold Coast – now Ghana.

Life expectancy has hit a new high in the United States: 76.4 for men, 81.4 for women. But it’s important to remember that certain demographics have widely varying expectancies due to several major variables. 

How one person singlehandedly created a forest, saved an island, and changed the world. Image credit: Amarjyoti Borah, via Al Jazeera. “The trees are man’s best friends; but man has […]

The emergence of email catapulted the @ from typographical obscurity onto everybody’s keyboard. Now the thing had to have a name fit for the digital age. Despite an early proliferation […]

Despite the ivory trade having been prohibited for 25 years, tens-of-thousands of elephants are illegally killed in Africa every year. The West African nation of Togo has turned to technology to help it combat ivory smuggling.

One of the scariest parts of being fired is that it seemingly affixes a scarlet letter to your chest for future hiring managers to avoid. But if you approach the conversation correctly, a recent firing could be harnessed as an asset in a job interview.

The facelift designs for a zoo in Givskud, Denmark inspire awe (and just a little bit of terror). BIG, the firm tasked with rethinking the animal park’s look, calls it “the world’s most advanced zoo.”

For many of us, zoos are a depressing experience featuring tiny, dirty cages, concrete floors, and sad animals. Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and his team at BIG were commissioned by […]

The Eagle has landed. NASA released this image of the roughly 2 million years old (a relatively youthful star cluster) of M16, surrounded by glowing gas and natal clouds of […]

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

There’s a cosmic creature lurking in IC 1396, a star formation region full of dust clouds and gas. Or at least that’s what it looks like in this image.  NASA explains:  […]

Thinking, like seeing, has built-in blind spots. An old parable and Husserl’s matchbox can illuminate these geometric, biological, and cognitive limits. We can’t evade their unseen dangers unaided. In the […]

If you’re a hunter-gatherer, as we are, you better get up in the morning and think it is a great day to catch an elephant. 

Update March 25th 2014:The Psychiatric Timeshave republished the article along with responses from those involved. On 6th December 2013 the journal Psychiatric Times published an article online by Richard Noll, a […]

Seven of the greatest and most entertaining achievements of human ingenuity. “I love that moment just before the curtain goes up…It’s a thrill that’s unequaled anywhere.” -Joel Grey It’s a […]

If the eyes are the windows of the soul, can the windows of an artist’s studio—the vistas they viewed daily for inspiration—offer a glimpse into their soul? In anticipation of […]

Call me a quitter. But I never did finish Moby Dick. Herman Melville’s writing is magnetic – in both senses of the word: attractive for its beauty and passion, and […]

Let others debate whether Santa Claus is white or not. There’s no debate that the definitive American Santa is political cartoonist Thomas Nast’s Merry Old Santa Claus (detail shown above) […]

The great elephant in the room in the health care discussion is the huge cost of keeping alive those already in the final stages of life.  Is there a better way to approach this, or to even discuss it?  Right now, we are doing neither.

Kudos to the ever-reasonable Ruth Marcus, who defends her friend Emily Yoffe, who wrote what seems on the deconstructed face of things to be banal advice: young women are safer […]

In an act of defiance against poachers and traffickers, the government will destroy five tons of seized ivory worth millions on the open market.

When David Bowie played Andy Warhol in the 1996 film Basquiat, he wore Warhol’s actual wig and glasses. Bowie met Warhol in his travels through the art world and even […]

Draw two dots above a straight line, place them in a circle, and even children a few years old will spot the semblance with a human countenance. Whether it’s the features […]