The title of this blog is the title of a talk I will be giving real soon, this Thursday, March 29, as part of "Ignite Boston 9" at MIT's Media Lab.  No, you cannot go unless you are one of the…

In a now-famous experiment, people are told to carefully look for and count certain details of a performance.  During the performance, a man in a gorilla suit walks across the stage, bows, and…

India and China rank 123rd and 121st in pollution control respectively, reflecting the strain rapid economic growth imposes on the environment, according to the 2010 Environmental Performance Index (…

The Being Human conference was held yesterday, March 24th, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Part of its description is " insights from science and philosophy shed new light on the…

The sounds of mowers (ours among the others) can be heard from where I sit inside in my recliner, hiding behind my laptop, trying to ignore the chaos that surrounds me. The kids have gone quiet in…

ECONOMICS   Many observers of human history have recognized cycles of behavior. Most of them have attempted to quantify these wave patterns of behavior hoping to be able to use them to…

Plants, while not generally thought of as being intelligent, do exhibit problem solving, planning, communication, and defensive behavior.  Plants actively search for nutrients and for sunlight.…

Composition of radiant heat   Both conduction and convection are ways of carrying heat from one place to another which require the presence of a material substance, either solid, liquid or…

After fixing the Higgs boson mass to the best fit value mh = 125 GeV, the SM does not have any free parameter left to vary. Therefore all the anomalies in the present data must be statistical…

This is interesting, on the BBC website: In pictures: Russian Empire in colour photos The first picture is captioned: This vivid colour photograph is 100 years old, a self-portrait by the Russian…

How a society treats the disabled, especially those in need of specialized care due to aggressive behaviors and self-injurious behaviors, says a lot about the morality and compassion of that society…

This blog will be devoted to a consideration of the Science of Facilitated Communication Training (FCT), as someone who uses it (as a facilitator, not as a person with a disability).   Given the…

When Energy Secretary Steven Chu was appointed, it was a bit of a policy worry.  Yes, he has a Nobel prize in physics but being a scientist has never shown to be any great benefit for policy.…

Artist Laura Hines has done a couple of gorgeous illustrations of Humboldt squid. Humboldt Squid #1 (above) is a rendering of this photograph from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute: It's a…

The building blocks of matter: Molecules: /> Many of the ancient Greek philosophers believed that allsubstances were composed of tiny particles or atoms; but it was not until the nineteenth…

New York University cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor Allen Feldman is visiting the University of Sydney, notes the blog site of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry…

There are over 400 different tribal and other ethnic groups in India. The tribals constitute about 7.5 per cent of Indian population (Gupta, 1970). Apart from the tribal groups, many other forest…

For many years, it was thought that new brain cells could not develop in adulthood and that the connections between nerves were fairly static after childhood.  This was primarily because it wasn…

There is nothing like computer-assisted post-mortem analysis of your chess games to get you back to reality about the potential of your brain: the computer sees so much more than you do, and so much…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE   Futurologists tend to look at the impacts of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics in isolation. It is a simple matter to…