As teachers begin using new and questionable methods, will students suffer and get left behind? “Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.”–Dan Quayle As the first full […]
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If you had never heard of global warming before, how would you figure out whether it’s happening? “There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point […]
Dozens of papers have been published to create the perfect commuting algorithm. But how do you account for factors like the weather? Or even local politics?
According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, three fears account for “the most expensive, ambitious projects humans have ever undertaken.”
If we knew all we do about math and physics, but had never seen the heavens, what would we conclude? “Both the solutions must be rejected, and as these are […]
Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 was not a giant comet, but if you did the math – which astronomers did at the time – you would know just what a catastrophic impact it would have.
Tech-savvy, hard-working people, says Tyler Cowen in his book Average is Over, have a lot to gain in the new economy. The rest of us? Not so much.
Answer: Hormones. That’s true, but not the whole predicament. Middle school has issues. The problem is often folded into a larger, if illusory, “problem” of the U.S. public school system […]
How the Universe tells us its age, size, and properties, and leads us inescapably to the conclusion that it’s billions, not merely thousands, of years old. Today, we’re lucky enough to […]
Why the kind of knowledge you get by asking the Universe questions about itself is the most valuable type of knowledge there is. “I’m also uncomfortable with dogmatic believers; to my […]
When I was 15, my geography teacher almost ruined maps for me. He stubbornly avoided what fascinated me about cartography: the why and how of those borderlines that cut and […]
What a golden age these past few decades have been for learning about how human cognition works. And what a humbling age, as we discover the truth that satirist […]
Computer-generated models published in the journal eLife demonstrated how plants might regulate the rate at which they consume starch that they will need once the sun goes down.
Last week, I invited a few friends to come together and talk about Bitcoin. The conversation was wide ranging (read: ill-organized), but interesting. Three key topics emerged out of the […]
It seems to me that our communication will begin in terms of mathematics and physics.
In the video below, Justin Solonynka, a teacher at the Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, PA, uses a game he bought for his two-year-old daughter to teach his 7th grade class about permutations and combinations.
Art and music is part of what it means to be a human being.
When all the galaxies, stars, gas, dust, dark matter and all the other forms of matter and radiation are summed together, its energy still pales in comparison to dark energy. […]
According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, three fears account for “the most expensive, ambitious projects humans have ever undertaken.”
The second annual Maker Camp, a free online program targeting kids and teens already bored with summer break, started Monday (July 8). Among other things, it promises to teach campers how to make 30 new things in six weeks.
Within the field of artificial intelligence, a new Japanese initiative promises to further blur the line between human and machine. A group of AI researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics just […]
Being an engineer is not just about being able to calculate and analyze. It’s a whole spectrum of skills.
“I do not know whether I shall return from my long weekend trip alive,” the mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport once wrote. “But I do know that the number of traffic […]
Some states are in particularly bad shape, but it would be dangerous to assume that all is well with public-employee pensions anywhere in America.
As we move toward a more cashless society, the dangers of credit transactions are becoming more apparent as those vulnerable to abusing credit also increase in number.
When you tell a child “You’re so smart,” you’re unwittingly encouraging a fixed mindset.
“It is time” physicist Neil Turok has said, “to connect our science to our humanity, and in doing so to raise the sights of both”. This sounds like a job for a philosophy not yet dead.
I just came to realize that what we got involved in and what I had been supporting was turning education into a desiccated, data-driven, anti-human activity and this would not encourage the love of learning.
A life well-lived is likely to serve others while satisfying our inner passions. When people get lost in their lives and careers, Sir Ken Robinson would argue, they’re usually serving one at the expense of the other.
A team of scientists from Oxford University have shown that zapping the brain with electrical impulses improves its ability to complete mathematical problems in the short and long term.