Common(s) Sense
Garrett Hardin's famous essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," argued that individual self-interest would always destroy any land or resource collectively held by a community. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics last year, thinks otherwise. Citing examples from Swiss peasants to African farmers, Ostrom argues that community property often does flourish and people... posted on Mar 09 2010, 3,442 reads

Meditate Like a Marine
The moments just before deployment can be highly stressful for those in the military, but a new study published in the journal Emotion finds that meditation improved mood and bolstered working memory -- the short-term memory used for managing information, controlling emotions, problem solving and complex thought. By just meditating 12 minutes a day, the Marines were able to boost their scores on m... posted on Mar 06 2010, 5,899 reads

Your Brain on Income Inequality
The human brain is a big believer in equality -- and a team of scientists from Caltech and Ireland's Trinity College has become the first to gather the images to prove it. Specifically, the team found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This activity pattern holds true e... posted on Mar 02 2010, 3,592 reads

iBrain: Mobile Communication Device in Your Head
Before brain scans, nobody could see your brain. Thinking was one thing; doing was another. Scans, however, have abolished that distinction and illuminated the paradoxical world of cognitive acts. Now, brains scans take us beyond "behavior that is readily observable" to something deeper: behavior within the brain. But this inner behavior, in turn, is only a clue to something still deeper. The ... posted on Feb 12 2010, 4,206 reads

Our World May Be a Giant Hologram
For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stu... posted on Feb 07 2010, 4,696 reads

Clean Smell Inspire Virtue?
A new study found that people are more likely to give away money and volunteer their time when they're in a clean-smelling room. Researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, the participants were given $12 cash and told that an anonymous partner in the next room expected them to divide it fairly. In practice, the folks in the clean-smelling room returned nearly twice as much money as those... posted on Nov 26 2009, 2,352 reads

The Collaborative Art Revolution
One of the Web's basic tenets is that small contributions from lots of people can amount to something powerful in the aggregate. Now, a growing group of writers, musicians, visual artists and videographers is turning this Wikipedia-era philosophy into online collaborative art. Twitter users are banding together to write an opera for London's Royal Opera House. Bands like My Morning Jacket and Sour... posted on Aug 27 2009, 2,260 reads

When A Phone Is Not Just A Phone
A cellphone is not just for calling, texting and taking pictures anymore. Several startup business ventures spawned by MIT students, sometimes as class projects and sometimes as independent work, are exploring new ways to harness the increasingly ubiquitous devices. They are using phones to help people, especially in developing nations, to raise their incomes, learn to read, get where they're goin... posted on Jul 15 2009, 3,901 reads

How to Build a Bigger Brain
People have many strategies for building bigger muscles and stronger bones. But what can one do to build a bigger brain? Meditate. That's the finding from a group of researchers at UCLA who used high-resolution MRI's to scan the brains of people who meditate. Research has already confirmed the beneficial aspects of meditation. In addition to having better focus and control over their emotions, man... posted on Jul 04 2009, 6,951 reads

15-year-old Social Entrepreneur-Inventor
At the tender age of 9, Javier Fernandez-Han found his calling: inventing to help the world's poor meet their basic needs sustainably. Several years of research and design have led to an innovative solution: The VERSATILE System -- a mashup of new and adapted technology -- is driven by Algae, the little organism that could. For his work, Javier, 15, won the top prize in this year's Invent Your W... posted on Jun 20 2009, 6,043 reads