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Getting married by a priest or at a courthouse can feel underwhelming. Experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats wants to revolutionize the wedding by ditching the boring old officiants and replacing them with quantum physics.

Catch MIT scientist Sara Seager take you to the cutting edge and into the future, with a live blog (plus commentary) right here! “Hundreds or thousands of years from now, […]

Ideas about religion can be so powerful that people can’t endorse them without giving up a part of their identity. It’s the same thing with diets.

When everything passes away, what will be left? “End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of […]

Hugs may have healing properties (beyond making you feel warm and fuzzy). This flu season add a hug a day to your regimen–it may help lessen your cold symptoms, according to one study.

Your smartphone’s GPS capability could prove useful — perhaps even life-saving — in the moments before a major earthquake. 

The ability to send an emotion — a feeling — to someone a world away may not be a thing of the future anymore. Researchers have found they can stimulate different emotions by blowing air onto certain parts of your hand. 

Journaling can help you see progress and where progress needs to be made.

The next wave of retirees will be more tech-savvy than ever.

A series of mysterious white features lurk at the bottom of one of its most massive craters. Here’s what they could be, and how we’ll find out! “One of the […]

Some maps would rather make a point than give directions.

Star Trek’s logic illustrates weaknesses in pop psychology’s models of emotions, intuition, logic, and morality. The best current cognitive science on this is well described by Daniel Kahneman. Let’s “Kahnemanize” Kirk and Spock:

Google’s Project Oxygen recently vindicated those who refute the claim that managers don’t matter. Now the search giant’s researchers want to dive deeper and explore the building blocks of team chemistry.

For art history, August 21 and 22 are the dates that will live in infamy. In some strange nexus of negative karma stretching over nearly a century, three of the greatest art heists of all time took place on these dates.

“No society has been able to abolish human sadness; no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.”

NASA just posted all 8,400 photos from all 12 Apollo missions to Flickr. Here are the best in full, original resolution. “Suddenly, from behind the rim of the Moon, in […]

Some day fact-checking will be as easy as using spell-check.

The highest-resolution panorama ever taken by a rover illuminates unprecedented detail of the red planet’s surface. “Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something […]

College campuses have become a breeding ground of intolerance and shame — vigilant liberalism is destroying free speech. 

Co-living spaces offer a cheap, all-in-one package: a place where freelancers can live and work with other self-employed individuals. But is this system crossing the boundaries of work and life?

A school district in Iowa is one of the first to outfit its administrators with body cameras. Their use should ease tensions with regard to transparency and accountability, but not everyone is happy with the precedent they set.

There are lots of wrong reasons out there, but only one that matters. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in […]

Why the argument that “this idea is absurd” is no argument at all. “He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and […]

Nature invented software billions of years before we did. “The origin of life is really the origin of software,” says Gregory Chaitin (inventor of mathematical metabiology). Life requires what software does. It is fundamentally algorithmic. And its complexity needs better thinking tools.

Robots have already bested humans in chess and Jeopardy; now, developers are trying to create the next poker master.

Too many people continue to die in hospitals, often in pain and hooked up to machines, when they’d much prefer to die at home in peace surrounded by family and friends. Dr. Angelo Volandes’ new book helps guide families to understanding end-of-life scenarios and to take control over their fates.

Business executive Amanda Mesler draws upon her 26 years of leadership experience to explain what it takes to be a CEO: vision, execution, backbone, and a strong support system.

Do “free markets” deliver efficiency as advertised? Economists often use “efficient” differently. Therein hides perhaps the last unlaughed-at Utopian ideas. 

Happy families combat the stress of the modern age by always adapting. The system out of which this adaptation occurs is the weekly family meeting.

The Icelandic government is considering a radical financial shift that would effectively end banking as we know it.