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I am taking a couple of weeks off. But while I’m away, I thought I’d share with you some of the what I consider to be this year’s essential readings […]

Except for some of the harsh, impermanently inhabited and sparsely visited inlands of Kerguélen, there are no places left on Earth to name. Those with a penchant for baptising should […]

You might have heard me speak about the equation that eluded Einstein for the last 30 years of his life: the one-inch equation that will in a sense summarize everything we […]

“No matter where consumers buy books, their belief that electronic media should cost less—that something you can’t hold simply isn’t worth as much money—will exert a powerful force,” writes Ken Auletta.

Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, is on record as having said that he can’t imagine oil being more than $30 a barrel by […]

The astronaut describes what her space flight meant for Middle Eastern women and why she is proud of female protesters in her native Iran.

Personally, I remember back in the 1970s when string theory fell out of favor. At the time, it was very difficult to get a job and many people dismissed the […]

“Remarkable claims require remarkable proof.” — Carl Sagan The “multiverse” idea—once thought to be so crazy it only belonged on late night television—has now become the dominant theory in all of […]

I would put Albert Einstein among the 20 top people who have ever lived, in terms of their impact on our way of life. Kings, queens, and emperors have come […]

Those enthusiasts about China’s perky economy should heed the warnings of Premier Wen Jiabao on the dangers of overinvestment producing another economic bubble.

Physics is a process of rigorous, exhausting intellectual inquiry, but it does offer occasional moments that are “kind of fun.” For Harvard’s Lisa Randall, one such moment came when she […]

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about the Large Hadron Collider in the news lately. After 16 years the LHC seems to be in the headlines each week, breaking speed, […]

One of the biggest criticisms of contemporary art is that it has no connection to the community. These works seemingly exist in a vacuum with no ties to the people […]

Hoping to make offshore wind farms more profitable, Norwegian experts are building the world’s largest and most powerful turbine, but with a twist – it floats!

It was a star-spangled day for America at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada yesterday with a trio of home-grown athletes striking gold.

A group of butterflies sent into outer space as part of an experiment are having trouble flying in the low gravity conditions which flings them into “chaotic and rapid flight”.

If we take another look at the space/time spectrum could we come up with a theory of quantum gravity?

The latest astronauts to reach the International Space Station have kicked off a Space-based Christmas by arriving wearing Santa hats, elf costumes and clutching a Christmas tree.

The looming menace of widespread chronic disease is a lot like the prospect of major climate change. Both future crises are expected on the basis of imperfect projections which don’t […]

Gravity may not be a force of attraction, but a ‘force’ similar to momentum with energy transferred on a subatomic level.

Expectations for the Copenhagen summit next month are dropping like a cartoon anvil. Where once there was talk of a comprehensive international accord on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, now the great […]

Ok this is related to our current discussion of time in davids idea i felt it merits its own. Here is something that i have been chewing over. herbie said […]

The human mind is full of contradictory impulses. For instance, I doubt that many of us want the President to do his own laundry. He’s not like us; he has […]

This is why I believe in God and science.

Over a century ago, a Russian scientist dreamed up the idea for a space elevator. It was an audacious scheme for a cable to connect the Earth to space allowing […]

Like a great gravity-eating vortex, the world of “pull” is increasingly at our digitized fingertips with new ways to bring previously out-of-reach information into the realm of practical individualized use. […]

String theory is trying to reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity, Randall says.