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While our own personal histories happen one event at a time, our brains make sense of our lives by stringing these events together in an structured way.

The sub-title to this piece is “Patient-Advocates as Harbringers of Hope in the Health Care System.” n Disclaimer: I am a Libertarian-Progressive. I generally trust markets more than I trust […]

Economic researchers are uncovering the chemical triggers in our brains that spark feelings of trust—and using their findings to better understand how markets work.

“Policies that generate more widely shared prosperity lead to stronger and more sustainable economic growth—and that’s good for everyone.” Robert Reich on how to fix the recession.

One of the most wonderful things about the emerging global superbrain is that information is overflowing on a scale beyond what we can wrap our heads around.

For all the obstacles President Obama has faced—the terrible economy and the bitter, partisan bickering—he managed to accomplish much of what he set out to accomplish.  He implemented a recovery […]

Dr. James Watson can’t help but speak his mind. And this has gotten the co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helix in trouble in the past. He has been called, among other things, […]

As metaphors for the mind go, one researcher at Stanford says our brains function much more like search engines than computers. We are more probabilistic than deterministic, she says.

German city planners are hoping that applying “environmental psychology” will help make Hamburg’s huge new urban development a success.

Yesterday, Howard University hosted a panel discussion on “The Poetry of Science” featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins. Among subjects, Tyson and Dawkins discussed the prospects for life on […]

The Center for American Progress has released a valuable analysis of the factors that account for the huge ideological imbalance in political talk radio. Here’s what they pinpoint as the […]

Afters months of waiting, I have finally been able to get my act together enough to post the answers to questions you posed to Dr. Adam Kent. If you remember […]

Who gets to say who owns our libraries, and what are the risks embedded in making a library profit-driven? The New York Times choice to give Library Systems and Services […]

It is a cliché that the brain is the “largest sex organ,” but the repetition of the phrase doesn’t make it any less true.

The fact that technological power comes in smaller, faster and cheaper objects is a very important observation that underlies many of the phenomena around us today.

There’s no such thing as a verbatim, facsimile memory, says USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. When we reconstruct events in our minds, we are pulling together set sequences of specific details stored in different parts of the brain.

There are a lot of Twitter dismissives among science bloggers, but the mobile technology has promise, journalists and others just have to understand how to structure its use successfully.One such […]

Sexual violence against women in the African nation has become an “incredibly inexpensive tool for controlling and eviscerating the population,” says Eve Ensler, founder of the advocacy group V-Day.

The first two months that the new Fox Business Channel was on the air, it averaged a mere 6,900 viewers on any given weekday. The handful of viewers for the […]

We’ve found out the winner of 2010 Pliny for volcanic event of the year yesterday, so now let’s look back at the entire year in volcanic activity. It was a […]

Now you can shop in a volcano … but watch out for the insurance premiums!

Psychiatrists see a lot of people who are, to use the technical term, screwed up. Psychiatrists’ talk, then, often turns around curing, or ameliorating, or at least preventing “bad” behaviors […]

“To put it bluntly, the bean counters are out of their depth.” David Rieff says insistence on strict accountability in foreign aid programs means losing hearts and minds in Afghanistan.

Runaway executive bonuses on Wall-Street are here to stay, says John Cassidy at The New Yorker. The financial writer laments Washington’s failure to curtail abusive payouts.

The Free University Berlin has an associate professor opening in Science Communication, as part of their Department of Political and Social Sciences and their Institute of Media and Communication Studies. […]

Brown University has a news advisory out about Ken Miller’s presentation at the panel on “Communicating Science in a Religious America.” From the release: Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology […]

Computer programming is a lot like writing a recipe. If you’ve read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is and you can copy the format to […]

Kilauea continues its active summer, the USGS refines the geologic timescale and the new boon in volcano tourism.

As I wrote last week, deliberative forums and town hall-type meetings are one of the major innovations in science communication and engagement. Whether forums are focused on climate change or […]

Judge Richard Posner supports a value-added tax as part of an overall tax reform plan to encourage entrepreneurial development and avoid increasing the debt burden on the future.