This Is Your Brain on the Internet
We are bombarded by information, thanks in large part to the internet and its allied technologies. But exposure to unlimited information is not the same thing as the ability to capture it as knowledge or synthesize it as understanding. "We are living in a state of perpetual distraction," says Nicholas Carr, "which crowds out the more contemplative, calmer modes of thinking." We need these quieter,... posted on May 31 2013, 9,112 reads

14 Year-Old Gets Photos of Space
A Lego man encased in a homemade weather balloon ended his journey to the edge of space on a New Hampshire driveway, bringing with him a trove of atmospheric data as well as stunning images of the curvature of the Earth. The balloon, which landed on August 25, is the brainchild of a 14-year-old student named Jack Miron from Bedford, New Hampshire. He didn't know that NASA is using this technology ... posted on Jan 08 2013, 10,986 reads

How Ignorance Fuels the Evolution of Knowledge
"In the fifth century BC, long before science as we know it existed, Socrates, the very first philosopher, famously observed, 'I know one thing, that I know nothing.' Some 21 centuries later, while inventing calculus in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton likely knew all there was to know in science at the time -- a time when it was possible for a single human brain to hold all of mankind's scientific knowledg... posted on Aug 21 2012, 18,463 reads

A Brief History of Timekeeping
"For millennia, humans have sought to make sense of time, to visualize it, to ride its arrow, to hack it, to understand biological connection to it. 'Time is the very foundation of conscious experience,' writes Dan Falk in 'In Search of Time: The History, Physics, and Philosophy of Time.' And yet that awareness has a long history of friction -- to mark and measure the passage of time has proven re... posted on Aug 06 2012, 10,714 reads

The Science of 'Social Jet Lag'
"'Six hours' sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,' Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.) This perceived superiority of those who can get by on less sleep isn't just something Napoleon shared with dictators like Hitler and Stalin, it's an enduring attitude woven into our soci... posted on May 20 2012, 18,348 reads

How 17 Equations Changed the World
When legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was setting out to release A Brief History of Time, one of the most influential science books in modern history, his publishers admonished him that every equation included would halve the book's sales. Undeterred, he dared include E = mc^2, even though cutting it out would have allegedly sold another 10 million copies. The anecdote captures the ... posted on May 08 2012, 15,635 reads

The Northern Lights in Action
Few things take our breath away so easily, so seamlessly as images of our world -- Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights. Sit back for the next two minutes and let the spectacle of our cosmos fill your senses. The deep emotional relationship we feel to our planet is evident.... posted on Apr 28 2012, 8,497 reads

10 Points on the Science of Spreading Good
"Good deeds are contagious. We naturally imitate the people around us, we adopt their ideas about appropriate behavior, and we feel what they feel. Acts of charity are no exception. In our 2010 generosity experiment, we showed that every extra dollar of giving in a game designed to measure altruism caused people who saw that giving to donate an extra twenty cents. Furthermore, the network acts lik... posted on Mar 21 2012, 46,799 reads

Profit vs. Principle: The Neurobiology of Integrity
Let your better self rest assured: Dearly held values truly are sacred, and not merely cost-benefit analyses masquerading as nobel intent. Neuroscientist Greg Berns of Emory University and colleagues posed a series of value-based statements to 27 women and 16 men while using an fMRI machine to map their mental activity. Test participants were asked if they'd sign a document stating the opposite of... posted on Feb 29 2012, 19,209 reads

High Schooler Devises Potential Cancer Cure
17-year-old Angela Zhang's after school project may change the world. Zhang has been making headlines recently after taking home a check of $100,000 from the national Siemens science contest, and now it has been suggested that her research could lead to a potential cure for cancer. "I created a nanoparticle that's kind of like the Swiss Army knife of cancer treatment in that it can detect cancer c... posted on Feb 18 2012, 20,104 reads