The world is filled with a variety of sounds. While some noises may produce joy and happiness, others may generate contrasting emotions such as sadness and anger. The impact of sound is powerful and affects multiple areas of everyday life. Noise can even affect one’s health and well-being....

Clouds play a vital role in Earth’s energy balance, cooling or warming Earth’s surface depending on their type   Like many of us, Earth works on a budget – an energy budget. However, this energy isn’t the type that powers our automobiles or electric lights. It’s the...

Hallucinations, Forgotten Faces, and Other Cognitive Quirks   What’s the Big Idea? If seeing is believing, then how do we come to know? One common misperception holds that vision springs directly from the eyes. True, the eyes, ears, and skin bombard us with a constant stream of...

There is something to be said for letting go of the mantle of expert, argues Peter Fiske.   In science, intellect and intelligence are valued above all else. Scientists spend years in graduate programmes, studying, teaching and researching, to become experts in their fields. Having...

Radical Theory Explains the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life, Challenges Conventional Wisdom   The earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that...

Psychologists are learning that the brain stays agile well into middle age, retaining the ability to learn new skill sets and take on different points of view by building new neural connections. And nothing is more important to maintaining a healthy brain than receiving an education, say...

At 13, an age when most boys want to learn the guitar, Gary Marcus, decided he wanted to be a scientist. Twenty-five years later he had become one of the country’s best known cognitive psychologists, with major papers and three general-interest books on the workings of the human mind and a...

What five-year-old Albert Einstein can teach us about serendipity and the filter bubble of information.   A newborn baby would stare at a new image for an average of 41 seconds before becoming bored and tuning out on repeated showings — that’s how hard-wired our affinity for novelty...

MIT neuroscientists explore how longstanding conflict influences empathy for others   MIT postdoc Emile Bruneau has long been drawn to conflict — not as a participant, but an observer. In 1994, while doing volunteer work in South Africa, he witnessed firsthand the turmoil surrounding...

We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages, twenty . . . seventy? Such feats of linguistic prowess provide a glimpse into what the human brain is capable of–and hold up a mirror to our desire to live without language barriers on a...

Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Philadelphia, responds: Researchers have pinpointed differences between the brains of believers and nonbelievers, but the neural picture is not yet...

“Bloggers are famous enough to have stalkers, but not famous enough to have bodyguards.” —Danny O’Brien Everyone thinks they want a million Twitter followers and a million pageviews a day on their blog and the incredible high that it must be to walk around in the world...

Why is there something rather than nothing? That’s the question cosmologist Lawrence Krauss tackles in his new book, A Universe from Nothing. In it, he surveys the discoveries that have led to scientists’ current understanding of the universe, and explores what the future of the...

You might someday be much, much smarter than you are now. That’s the hope of neuroscientists focused on understanding the basis of intelligence. They have discovered that the brains of people with high IQs tend to be highly integrated, with neural paths connecting distant brain regions,...

Tackling a crossword can crowd the tip of your tongue. You know that you know the answers to 3 Down and 5 Across, but the words just won’t come out. Then, when you’ve given up and moved on to another clue, comes blessed relief. The elusive answer suddenly occurs to you, crystal clear.The...

Many of us subscribe to false beliefs about how our memories work, sometimes with serious consequences   As a lifelong user of human memory, you probably feel you’ve got a good idea of how it works, right? To test your understanding of memory, we compare several commonplace...

Using eye-tracking technology, scientists are discovering clues to how we think and learn   As you read these words, try paying attention to something you usually never notice: the movements of your eyes. While you scan these lines of text, or glance at that ad over there or look up from...

Dancing with the absurdity of life, or what symbolism has to do with the osmosis of trash and treasure. New, old, and dead writers offer their advice for stepping up your literary game.   These parallel aspirations are a collection of timeless texts bound to radically improve your...

In November 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most ambitious mission to Mars. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet this August, releasing a lander that will use rockets to control a slow descent into the atmosphere. Equipped with a “sky...

More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci observed a particular relationship between the size of a tree’s trunk and the size of its branches. Specifically, the combined cross-sectional areas of a tree’s daughter branches are equal to the cross-sectional area of the mother branch. However,...

The number 13 is synonymous with bad luck. It’s considered unlucky to have 13 guests at a dinner party, many buildings don’t have a 13th floor and most people avoid getting married or buying a house on a day marked by this dreaded number. Especially superstitious folks even avoid...

Build A New One In Space Supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act, and their corporate backers in the movie and recording industries, are on the war path. They’re easily out-spending their opponents in the internet world and unless something miraculous happens, it’s only a matter of time...

A Manifesto for Curiosity Curiosity. We’re all born with it. Albert Einstein dubbed it “holy,” Alistair Cooke called it “free-wheeling intelligence.” It’s that piquing force that nudges us to try it again, explore it some more, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out. From...

From coquetry to selfishness, or what the Sea of Wealth has to do with the City and District of Love   Nineteenth-century ideals of womanhood and beauty expressed as much about women as they did about the society in which they were germinated. At a time of radical sociocultural and...

What the libraries of yore have to do with today’s information economy and the heart’s will. From Anne Lamott‘s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life: “You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational...

Comparatively few people are privileged to get within a foot or two of the physical remains (actual or cast) of ancient or historic human ancestors… at least, not without the necessary scientific credentials and sanctions reserved exclusively for the scientists who are responsible for...

Copyright is not an absolute. Potato chips are absolute. If this is my potato chip, then it’s not yours. You can’t touch it, eat it or use it for any reason whatsoever, not without asking first. Copyright doesn’t work that way. There is a ying to the yang of copyright...

Since the mid-1960s John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. He is a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, and his website Edge is a salon for the world’s finest minds   To say that John Brockman is a literary agent is like saying that David Hockney is a...

Caring for the Earth and for our environment seems to have been a notion dear to humankind since the dawn of time. Even to this day, many of those societies that are deemed “primitive” for having retained elements of a lifestyle that most human societies abandoned millennia ago exhibit, to...

Scientists have figured out how to make entire events disappear   Scientists at the Pentagon have just published some fascinating (understatement) research on “temporal cloaking”. As the team noted in Nature, “To achieve spatial cloaking, the index of refraction is manipulated to...

The Sumerian, Egyptian, Mayan, Judaic, Muslim, Nordic, Hindu, and pretty much most all major world religions that have spanned for thousands of years… all are based on a fundamental concept. Now, we have new Mayan tablets talking about December 21st, 2012 being the “End of Time...

Do we really have free will? Free will has long been a fraught concept among philosophers and theologians. Now neuroscience is entering the fray. For centuries, the idea that we are the authors of our own actions, beliefs, and desires has remained central to our sense of self. We choose whom...

The End Is Not Near At least that’s according to a German expert who says his decoding of a Mayan tablet with a reference to a 2012 date denotes a transition to a new era and not a possible end of the world as others have read it. The interpretation of the hieroglyphs by Sven Gronemeyer...