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This isn’t the Matrix. Should you wish to face the ugly reality, there’s no red pill you can swallow.

Writing is a recent innovation in the history of human evolution. So, how then is it that our brains organize this skill?

Worldwide, there is an annual net loss of 11 billion trees. Despite all reforestation efforts, this loss reflects the fact that while deforestation is a mechanized, rapid, and highly efficient process, reforestation, mostly done by hand, is a tiresome, laborious, and highly inefficient one.

The Universe was 99.999999% Hydrogen and Helium after the Big Bang. Billions of years later, there’s a new contender in town. “When it comes to atoms, language can be used […]

Mavens are defined as experts in their field, and identifying them can help businesses innovate and grow. So, researchers have developed a test to figure out whether someone is a maven.

An autonomous 18-wheeler has been given a license to drive the long stretches of open road that crisscross Nevada.

Feeling is a form of thinking. Both are ways of processing data, one is just faster. Daniel Kahneman’s mysterious coinages (System 1 and System 2) show how new language can help sidestep centuries of confusion. 

Researchers are working on a method to transform every blood type into O — the universal-donor blood type.

It’s home to everything we’ve ever directly explored, but where did our Solar System come from? “When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are […]

Image credit: © 2015 MotorTrend Magazine, via http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/suvs/1110_mopar_underground_jeep_and_ram_run_wild_at_moab/photo_06.html. How gravity teaches us that the mountains we see extend far underground. “Journalists often ask me when I go to the field, […]

Comparing “astronaut” to “cowboy” ethics can show that Locke’s limits on liberty need to be revised. We once could see that pitting self-interest against collective self-preservation wasn’t rational. Me-opic and logically unworkable ideas that economics sometimes encourage have made that harder to see.   

Modern technology has provided us with a seamless way of life, but we’ve also become accustomed to taking shortcuts.

Dishonesty in one domain doesn’t excuse hucksterism in another. Yet as long as healing remains a lucrative business, it’s going to remain a challenge weeding through the pretty designs and catchy slogans to find medicine that works.

Trivializing mental illness by making jokes on Twitter may not endear your followers to you.

Sure, they wiped out the dinosaurs, but do they really pose a risk to humans? “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind […]

The most important lessons about Earth come from looking outward. “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” […]

Adults who were breastfed as babies tend to have higher intelligence, spend longer at school, and earn more income, regardless of their family’s social class. 

If you’re self-employed or work in a job with irregular cash flow, it’s vital to dedicate yourself to a money management system that works for you.

Microsoft Senior Director of Search Stefan Weitz discusses the future of search technology.

How we’re still, only now, just discovering the closest stars to Earth. “As a boy I believed I could make myself invisible. I’m not sure that I ever could, but […]

Another world orbits the Sun once a year at the same distance as our planet. “The moon was like this awesome, romantic, mysterious thing, hanging up there in the sky […]

Swiss researchers, operating with the knowledge that kids learn better when able to teach their skills to other pupils, have developed a robot student to assist with lessons in penmanship.

Earlier this week, scientists at UC Irvine revealed that they have learned how to unboil an egg. Their discovery could lead to the development of a protein restoration system that would be a major asset in the fight against cancer.

The Supreme Court has considered a host of hotly divisive issues in the term that is wrapping up in just a couple of weeks. In addition to rulings on gay […]

Could humans someday live to be 1,000 years old? Life extension and radical longevity are rising topics of conversation among futurist circles… and wealthy tech entrepreneurs are listening.

New anthropological research demonstrates that belief in an all-powerful God is not essential to the formation and development of complex society.

Many issues stand against a mission to Mars: fuel, landing, and sustaining life on the red planet are just a few. But scientists say that the astronauts that depart will not be the same — the structure of their brains will change.

Dr. Travis Bradberry argues why your day at the office would do better without that cup of joe — it’s killing your performance.

Information Theory explicitly ignores meaning. Its focus on messages makes it uninformative about their effects. And limits the usefulness of its way of quantifying information. 

Govert Schilling’s new book deserves a place in everyone’s life. “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.” –Carl Sagan Imagine the […]