Science & Society

It's no secret social media is big - every marketing group latches on to the latest fad (even us - we gots the Tweetypages, we gots the Faceyspaceys) and people are using it more and more.   But…

Advocates of good science breathed a sigh of relief when Andrew Wakefield was finally lambasted for questionable methods and shoddy science, basically eliminating the validity of the fundamental text…

Rules for writing can vary from basic grammar principles to austere proverbs like Hemingway's "Write what you know!" In my previous article, I listed the first 12 rules of prose as delineated by…

Our 1950 pick is L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller's Genus Homo, a pulp adventure that takes place a million years in the future after after the genus Homo has destroyed itself, leaving the…

Little nuggets of (k)nowledge can often be the most simple and common sense ideas, but it takes someone else to put them into a coherent sentence. Tim Radford is a freelance journalist who has…

I think that there is an innate (somewhat mindblind) tendency to assume that other people think, feel, react the same way we do. Americans are often egocentric. We think that our way is the best way…

With 1949, we arrive at one of the big classics in the post-apocalyptic genre. George Stewart’s Earth Abides is epic in both scope and ambition, a bittersweet story that captures the immense scale on…

Large amounts of money are being siphoned from the multi-billion dollar cigarette smuggling trade and going right into the pockets of terrorist networks and international organized crime.  A…

Via GenomeWeb's Daily Scan, some comments on the prospects for citizen science in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Only one of the three appears to be an actual research scientist, but they make…

The last couple of months of organizing the H+ Summit at Harvard University, together with Alex Lightman, Kevin Jain, and all the other collaborators of the conference team, have been very intense.…