W. Tecumseh Fitch, Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna; Author, The Evolution of Language One of the most pernicious misconceptions in cognitive science is the belief in a dichotomy between nature and nurture. Many psychologists, linguists and social scientists, along with...

Anthony Aguirre, an Associate Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz Paradoxes arise when one or more convincing truths contradiction either each other, clash with other convincing truths, or violate unshakeable intuitions. They are frustrating, yet beguiling. Many see...

Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago. However, such drugs are useless against viral infections, including influenza, the common cold, and deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola. Now, in a development that could transform how...

The transparent Airbus powered by your body heat   Some people believe the future is something to look forward to. And, indeed, there is some evidence that, for a small number of people–especially those who work at Facebook–that might well be true. However, there are certain...

The night sky is a time machine. Look out and you look back in time. But this “time travel by eyesight” is not just the province of astronomy. It’s as close as the machine on which you are reading these words. Your present exists at the mercy of many overlapping pasts. So...

Olivia Wilde selected nipples for scene Actress Olivia Wilde had to odd task of choosing the digitally enhanced nipples that would appear on her character in upcoming comedy The Change-Up – because she never actually went nude for the cameras. The Hollywood beauty had to strip down to...

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, as of December 2008 161,892 bridges were classified as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. That’s more than a quarter of the bridges nationwide, a fraction that rises to a third in urban areas. According to the American Society...

Some astronomers say there could be tens of thousands of planets with life on them that we’ll have the capability of detecting soon. Or now. Some say there’s probably just a few. Not many are saying that there’s probably none, at least not very loudly. Well, a new paper from David...

P.Z. Myers, a Biologist, University of Minnesota; blogger, Pharyngula As someone who just spent a term teaching freshman introductory biology, and will be doing it again in the coming months, I have to say that the first thing that leapt to my mind as an essential skill everyone should have...

Introverts conserve energy, extroverts seize the day. Two little boys played at a lakeside beach. The water was cold and reached their waists, in some places their chests. One boy plunged right in. He didn’t know how to swim, but that didn’t stop him. The second boy stuck by the...

Scientists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) work under the assumption that there is, in fact, intelligent life out there to be found. A new analysis may crush their optimism. To calculate the likelihood that they’ll make radio contact with extraterrestrials,...

Sue Blackmore, a Psychologist; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction The phrase “correlation is not a cause” (CINAC) may be familiar to every scientist but has not found its way into everyday language, even though critical thinking and scientific understanding would improve if...

Paul Bloom, a psychologist, Yale University; Author, How Pleasure Works We are powerfully influenced by irrational processes such as unconscious priming, conformity, groupthink, and self-serving biases. These affect the most trivial aspects of our lives, such as how quickly we walk down a city...

Bart Kosko, an Information Scientist, USC; Author, Noise suggests that everyone should know what proof feels like. It reduces all other species of belief to a distant second-class status. Proof is the far end on a cognitive scale of confidence that varies through levels of doubt. And most...

The past and future may seem like different worlds, yet the two are intimately intertwined in our minds. In recent studies on mental time travel, neuroscientists found that we use many of the same regions of the brain to remember the past as we do to envision our future lives. In fact, our...

John Tooby, a Founder of field of Evolutionary Psychology; Co-Director, UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology We could become far more intelligent than we are by adding to our stock of concepts, and by forcing ourselves to use them even when we don’t like what they...

David M. Buss, a Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Coauthor: Why Women Have Sex; author, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating and Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind When most people think about evolution by selection, they conjure up phrases...

Evgeny Morozov, a commentator on Internet and Politics, “Net Effect” blog; Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy; Author, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom offers that constant awareness of the Eintstellung Effect would make a useful addition to our cognitive...

Mark Pagel, an Evolutionary Biologist, University of Reading; External Professor, The Santa Fe Institute; Author, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Evolution The Oracle of Delphi famously pronounced Socrates to be “the most intelligent man in the world because he knew that he knew...

Ships of the future may be able to move through the water without a creating a wake. That is according to a pair of physicists in the US, who have proposed a new type of material that lets water flow around an object as if it were not there at all. The design, which has yet to be built, could...

Kathryn Schulz, an author, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error points out while “The Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science” is cumbersome to say and difficult to remember, it is also a great idea. In fact, as the “meta” part suggests,...

Tania Lombrozo, Cognitive Psychologist, UC, Berkeley On its face, defeasibility is a modest concept with roots in logic and epistemology. An inference is defeasible if it can potentially be “defeated” in light of additional information. Unlike deductively sound conclusions, the...

Niccolò Machiavelli might well have titled his 16th-century Dell’arte Della Guerra (“The Art of War”) as The Art of Lying, since verbal deception—mainly, how to get away with it—was so central to his political psychology. To say that the exquisitely light-of-tongue are...

Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University; Author, What Are Journalists For?; PressThink.org Among some social scientists, there is this term of art: wicked problems. We would be vastly better off if we understood what wicked problems are, and learned to distinguish...

Jonah Lehrer, Contributing Editor, Wired; Author, How We Decide In the late 1960s, the psychologist Walter Mischel began a simple experiment with four-year old children. He invited the kids into a tiny room, containing a desk and a chair, and asked them to pick a treat from a tray of...

Jung thought psychology could offer a language for grappling with moral ambiguities in an age of spiritual crisis In 1959, two years before his death, Jung was interviewed for the BBC television programme Face to Face. The presenter, John Freeman, asked the elderly sage if he now believed in...

One day in 2009, Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student, opened his mail to discover a fine for $675,000. That was the sum total in damages the record industry reckoned he owed them for sharing 30 songs on the peer-to-peer website Kazaa. The amount was eventually reduced to...

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.” […] “…by some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.” – Pearl Buck, Winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature in...

Marco Iacoboni, a Neuroscientist, UCLA Brain Mapping Center; Author, Mirroring People offers that we can separate our “entangled buddies” as far as we can, they will still remain entangled. A change in one of them is instantly reflected in the other one, even though they are...

Vinod Khosla, a Technology Entrepreneur & Venture Capitalist, Khosla Ventures; Formerly General Partner at Kleiner Perkins. Caufield & Byers; Founder, Sun Microsystems believes that “black swan technology” is a conceptual tool that should be added to everyone’s...

Joseph D. Novak & Alberto J. Cañas, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition Pensacola Fl, 32502 offer theory underlying Concept Maps and how to construct and use them as a scientific concept. Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. They...

Edge of reason: Doubt and uncertainty are essential elements of the scientific process. Being comfortable with uncertainty, knowing the limits of what science can tell us, and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that would improve people’s lives, according to some...

You may have asked yourself the question, “Is science relevant to ‘real life’?” My answer to you is, “YES!” Without the ability to perform even the most simple science concepts you could miss out on much of “real life.” This lesson will...

The world’s insatiable demand for the rare-earth elements needed to make almost all technological gadgets could one day be partially met by sea-floor mining, hints an assessment of the Pacific Ocean’s resources. But accessing the treasure trove of key elements on the ocean floor...

Gregory Paul, an Independent Researcher; Author, Dinosaurs of the Air points out that scientists should be scientists. Scientists should know better than to cough up committed but dubious opinion on subjects outside our expertise. The plural of opinion is not facts, and the plural of anecdote...

Scientist sees aging cured   If Aubrey de Grey‘s predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger. A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist...