I will discuss Leibniz's ideas on complexity (Discours de metaphysique, 1686), leading to modern work on program-size complexity, the halting probability and incompleteness. Leibniz's principle of…

One remarkable aspect of human vision is the ability to understand the meaning of a novel image or event quickly and effortlessly. Within a single glance, we can comprehend the semantic category of a…

Mathematician Ludwig Schläfli talks to us about objects in the fourth dimension and shows us a procession of regular polyhedra in dimension 4, strange objects with 24, 120 and even 600 faces! Watch…

Economics And Climate Change I am confident that global climate change is real. I am also confident that over-complicated knee-jerk legislation and taxation will make matters worse.  Problems…

I am constantly amazed at how pathologizing variable phenomena is usually a human social agent. Consider the XY fertile Akodon females who go roaming around in South America. No other rodents seem to…

A team of Yale paleontologists have discovered a rich array of exceptionally preserved fossils of marine animals in Morocco that lived during the the early part of the Ordovician, between 480 million…

Judging by recent polls, you would think that the environment is not much of a concern to Americans. And You would also be wrong, say researchers from Standford University. When pollsters ask…

To avoid of the health risks associated with traditional cigarettes, attempts have been made to develop cigarettes that contain no tobacco and no nicotine. But a team of researchers writing in Cell…

By analyzing tiny variations in the isotopic composition of silver in meteorites and Earth rocks, scientists are putting together a timetable of how our planet was assembled 4.5 billion years ago.…

MIT neuroscientists writing in the Journal of Neurophysiology have developed a new method to analyze brain imaging data – one that may paint a clearer picture of how our brain produces and…

A RAND corporation study examining the long-term economic consequences of childhood psychological disorders suggests the conditions diminish people's ability to work and earn as adults, costing $2.1…

I had a sore throat this afternoon so I came home early to rest (translation: be babied by the wife; she gave birth and it's dismissed as part of a natural cycle but if I get a cold I expect to be…

So I'm a couple of weeks late, but it's worth noting that NY Times science blogger John Tierney is quitting his blog: After three years of experiments, TierneyLab is shutting down. I’ll still be…

This is going to be a short post where I confess my recent troubles with keeping everything going on at full speed in my life, while the workload constantly grows. I believe it is a temporary problem…

This piece about crumbling faith in expertise is making the rounds on the web (see also Becky's comments): The democratization of scientific expertise carries danger with it. If experts cannot be…

Carbon Fudgeprints It seems that everyone has a carbon footprint.  The idea is that everything you do puts CO2 into the atmosphere or if it doesn't then it jolly well ought to so let's work out…

A sinkhole in Saint-Jude, Quebec has just collapsed a house, killing a family of four inside, leading people to ask what they are, how they occur and obviously who is at risk. Sinkholes are…

You could be forgiven for thinking that the days when flying was a frontier science are well and truly over, but not so, as the Solar Impulse had its maiden flight recently. A flying machine no…

Since Darwin proposed universal common ancestry (UCA) More than 150 years ago, the theory, though well supported, has remained beyond the scope of formal testing. But the author of a new letter in…

Scientists from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and the University of Bayreuth say they have discovered how spiders form long, highly stable and elastic fibers from the proteins …