Our brains may be hardwired to look on the bright side   We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to...

A group of three researchers from KEK, Shizuoka University and Osaka University has for the first time revealed the way our universe was born with 3 spatial dimensions from 10-dimensional superstring theory in which spacetime has 9 spatial directions and 1 temporal direction. This result was...

As many people hit middle age, they often start to notice that their memory and mental clarity are not what they used to be.  We suddenly can’t remember where we put the keys just a moment ago, or an old acquaintance’s name, or the name of an old band we used to love.  As the...

Cognitive function may be a better indicator of the impact of aging on an economy than age-distribution, with chronological age imposing less of a social and economic burden if the population is “functionally” younger, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the...

The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy? At the headquarters of the John Templeton Foundation, a dozen kilometres outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the late billionaire seems to watch over everything. John Templeton‘s...

Three years ago when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), few people outside his field had heard of Peter Higgs. But as scientists there reveal they may have glimpsed the elusive Higgs boson particle which bears his name, Prof...

Finding the Higgs is the Beginning of a Long Quest to Discover a Theory of Everything   The announcement this week that two groups of scientists have narrowed the search for the elusive Higgs Boson made headlines around the world. Next year, physicists actually hope to find the Higgs...

What’s the Latest Development? Learning how the brain mingles its senses can do more than shed light on the latest glitch in streaming video. It may also be able to help some people rewire their sense of reality for their own good. When scientists compared children of the same age,...

What’s the Big Idea? Are you in a rut? Instead of changing what you do, try changing how you think about it, says Roger Martin, a strategic advisor to global businesses and Dean of the Rotman School of Management. In 2000, growth at Proctor & Gamble had slowed to almost zero, and the...

The report explores the functioning and role of the two halves of the human brain and the relationship between them. It is the right half which usually communicates with the primitive parts of the human brain and this is related to the functioning of the autonomic nervous system and the immune...

Instincts and Instinctive Behaviour We saw that instincts are an innate form of behaviour, that is a form of behaviour which is not learned but which the animal performs from birth, without being trained to do so. Behaviour relating to survival of a species, such as attack, defence and sexual...

Cognitive psychology is mapping the capabilities we are unaware we possess   Sigmund Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. Because this aspect of mind is, by definition, not...

Contrary to what many psychological scientists think, people do not all have the same set of biologically “basic” emotions, and those emotions are not automatically expressed on the faces of those around us, according to the author of a new article published in Current Directions...

By using optical equipment in a totally unexpected way, MIT researchers have created an imaging system that makes light look slow. Imagine a camera fast enough to capture not just a bullet in motion, but light particles themselves. Now imagine this as a consumer product, a frontier beyond...

A Large Hadron Collider for Human Civilization   As if re-creating the origins of the universe or reverse engineering the human brain weren’t hard enough, European scientists are also launching a brand new video game. The latest project in massive simulation is called the Living Earth...

Toxo Terror: Or, the Call That’s Coming From Within the House   The sheer ubiquity of microscopic organisms is staggering. Microbiologist Tom Curtis recently compared the size of the microbial population to the size of the universe: The number of microbes in the world is billions of...

Call it researching disease in the cloud or just plain illuminating, but Princeton researchers today published a paper in Science that demonstrates how aerial night images can be used to monitor the spread of epidemic in the developing world by tracking light density. That’s a mouthful, but...

CERN researchers announced this morning the barest of hints of the Higgs boson at the Large Collider. It’s not a discovery, and anyone that pays any sort of attention to this stuff knew just as well there wasn’t going to be a “discovery” announced today ‘cause that’s not really...

A chapter excerpted from The Quantum and the Lotus   The Interdependence and Nonseparability of Phenomena The concept of interdependence lies at the heart of the Buddhist vision of the nature of reality, and has immense implications in Buddhism regarding how we should live our lives. This...

Tomorrow, CERN will be webcasting a talk on the latest results in its search for the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to provide other particles with mass. The director of CERN has gone on record as saying there won’t be any announcement that we’ve definitively discovered...

“If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.” – Henry Miller Technology is an evolutionary force, sling-shooting the species forward as never before. We are fast approaching a new renaissance, an age of wonder and radical possibility. A...

And How You Can Use It to Your Advantage Music can often make or break a day. It can change your mood, amp you up for exercise, and help you recover from injury. But how does it work exactly, and how can you use it to your advantage? Recently, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords used music...

Earlier this week, the Internet was high off the first official confirmation of an exoplanet in a “habitable zone,” the area encompassing a star with conditions that could support liquid water. While it’s unclear just what makes up Kepler-22b, as this new planet is known, we do know that...

How our primate ancestors shaped our obsession with terrifying creatures Monsters fill the mythic landscape. In Hawaiian myth, there is a human with a “shark-mouth” in the middle of his back. In Aboriginal myth, there is a creature with the body of a human, the head of a snake, and the...

An unexpected and unwanted breakup can cause considerable psychological distress. People report feeling as if they have been kicked in the stomach or blindsided and knocked down. Feelings of rejection and self-doubt are common, as is the feeling of being stuck and unable to let go, even when...

Mapping data is everywhere now. If you have a smart phone or a Facebook account, you’re already using it all the time. A cornucopia of data streams has become available to the public, information is pouring in through everyone’s gadgets, and platforms like Google Maps allow for clever...

But Don’t Pack Your Bags The “habitable zone” in astronomy-speak is the area around a star where liquid water could exist. It’s not, like, some cozy astronaut campground off in the cosmos. We know now for sure that about 600 light years away the planet known as Kepler-22b orbits in...

NASA’s robotic exploration of the solar system is heavily focused on either finding life or at least potentially-habitable planets. To this end, one priority has been to follow the water: find water, find life right? But another important aspect in the search for otherworldly life is a...

Researchers in Japan have developed what may be the first string-theory model with a natural mechanism for explaining why our universe would seem to exist in three spatial dimensions if it actually has six more. According to their model, only three of the nine dimensions started to grow at the...

Meat left out too long will eventually bear maggots or mold. These days we know the maggots hatch from fly eggs and the mold grows from spores that were carried in the air, but in the past the fuzzy growth and wriggling white bodies were proof that whole organisms could spontaneously arise...

All knowledge, to all people, for all time, for free Universal access to all knowledge, Brewster Kahle Digital Librarian, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive, declared, will be one of humanity’s greatest achievements. We are already well on the way. “We’re building the...