Science & Society

The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers…

We haven't come that far, baby. In the 1970's male cartoon characters outnumbered female cartoon characters by a ratio of almost four to one. Research presented at the American Psychological…

The 1844 edition of the widely used schoolbook written by William H. McGuffey, “Newly Revised Eclectic Fourth Reader,” includes a dialogue about the difference between “true and false philanthropy”:…

In 1986, a film entered theaters and left almost immediately with little acclaim; because it had not even earned back half its budget.(1) Yet The Highlander went on to spectacular success in the…

Regression toward the mean is a simple phenomenon commonly described in Statistics 101 courses. If you measure a parameter describing some phenomenon, you will find that extreme measured values tend…