I suffer from eschatological obsession. That is, I spend lots of time brooding about ends. So the cover of the September Scientific American --which reads simply "the end."--made me all shivery, like when I hear the spooky sitar opening of The Doors' apocalyptic rock poem "The...
Digital Revolution Pathologists are traditionally seen as being detached from everyday clinical practice, which explains why we were so pleasantly surprised when we came across the interesting article “ A Better Lens on Disease ,” by Mike May. Even before the digital revolution, pathologists had developed rudimentary ways...
“ ’Tis the gift to be simple,” the Shakers sing. Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks take vows of poverty. Why? A new study published online in May in Psychological Science offers a hint. Money--even the thought of it--reduces satisfaction from life’s simple pleasures.
Do you believe in evolution? I do. But when I say "I believe in evolution," I mean something rather different than when I say “I believe in liberal democracy.” Evolutionary theory is a science. Liberal democracy is a political philosophy that most of us think has little to do with...
Electromagnetic pulses from far-flung celestial objects can provide a sort of scale with which to gauge the mass of the planets, according to a new study. [More]
In our experience, nothing ever really ends. When we die, our bodies decay and the material in them returns to the earth and the air, allowing for the creation of new life. We live on in what comes after. But will that always be the case? Might there come a...
If the 20th century was an expansive era seemingly without boundaries--a time of jet planes, space travel and the Internet--the early years of the 21st have showed us the limits of our small world. Regional blackouts remind us that the flow of energy we used to take for granted may...
There is no such thing as the Nobel Prize in Mathematics, but fortunately the field of math dishes out its own top honors every four years, bestowing the prestigious Fields Medal on two to four researchers. (Unfortunately for mathematicians, the cash prize attached to the Nobels is...
As speculation swirls around the status of possible investigations into research by the prolific Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser , a new study drills down to figure out the true cost of scientific misconduct. [More]
Probability calculations are at the heart of the software most of us rely on daily, whether it is Amazon.com or iTunes recommending new products based on previous purchases, a spam filter weeding out junk e-mail or a credit card processing program searching for potentially fraudulent transactions....
When trying to understand why some people have trouble living within their means, we tend to blame factors such as high interest rates and irresponsible spending. Now researchers have found another possible culprit to add to the list: a gene linked to credit-card debt.
I recently had the pleasure to revisit Warsaw, Poland, and St. Petersburg, Russia, two decades after the start of market reforms in which I had participated as an economic adviser. Both cities, proud and venerable capitals, had surmounted the tumultuous collapse of the Soviet era. Shops were full; architectural treasures...
When researchers make an exciting discovery, the data behind it are often closely guarded until they can be examined, developed and then revealed--at least in part--in a peer-reviewed journal with all of the proverbial fanfare. [More]
If there's one thing more potentially contentious than the international politics of global warming (which the world has spent at least the past 20-plus years dithering about), it's the politics of the most radical suggestion to solve it: geoengineering . After all, he who controls Earth's thermostat...
Web sites such as Amazon, TripAdvisor and Yelp have long depended on customers to rate books, hotels and restaurants. The philosophy behind this so-called crowdsourcing strategy holds that the truest and most accurate evaluations will come from aggregating the opinions of a large and diverse group of people. Yet a...
How much money do you put away each month toward retirement? Maybe you sock away all you can, already dreaming of that Florida condo. Or maybe you can’t even imagine where you’ll be then, what you’ll want to use the money for, even what you’ll be like: when you think...
Die-hard advocates of alternate energy might fantasize about cars that could one day run on water. But scientists in India have gone a step further. They’ve mathematically modeled an engine that should allow a motorcycle to run on air--compressed air, that is. Their design is described in the Journal...
Reform or Re-reform? In “ Numbers War ” [News Scan], Linda Baker’s treatment of our inquiry-based Discovering Mathematics series is filled with errors and naive claims. For instance, there was no “three-year pilot” of our texts, contrary to what Baker reported. The article repeats many unfounded criticisms of...
Researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) have invented a real-life Transformer, a device that can fold itself into two shapes on command. The system is hardly ready to do battle with the Decepticons--the tiny contraption forms only relatively crude boat and airplane shapes--but the concept...
