In a country where psychic hotlines dominate public airways at nighttime, university psychologists have begun to prove the ability to read auras is simply an added biological trait. Emilio Gomez is the supervisor for Oscar Iborra’s doctoral thesis, regarding special infrequent types of...

Pando, the Trembling Giant   Compared with a mite or a virus, we humans are enormous. But we share this planet with other organisms that, in turn, dwarf us. At 100 feet, a blue whale is about 18 times longer than the average person; a giant sequoia, three times that. There are even larger...

In this lecture for Westmont College’s series titled “Beyond Two Cultures: The Sciences as Liberal Arts,” string theorist Jim Gates offers his thoughts on the complementary natures of science and the liberal arts — and how the human mind formulates “systems of belief” in both...

The recent epic failure in rationing superlatives reminds us that hyperbole should be saved for the best of the best   One of the things that makes language fascinating is that it’s always evolving. Just sometimes, we need to intervene with that evolution, do a 360 and start a...

I just came back from a jazz festival at Katy High School in Texas that show-cased student stage bands from ten schools mostly near Houston, but some as far away as Beaumont and Brownsville (the latter band stole the show). The festival was also a teaching event, with each band or ensemble...

In memoriam: After years of health problems, Facts has finally died   A quick review of the long and illustrious career of Facts reveals some of the world’s most cherished absolutes: Gravity makes things fall down; 2 + 2 = 4; the sky is blue. But for many, Facts’ most...

Eric Kandel is a titan of modern neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in 2000 not simply for discovering a new set of scientific facts (although he has discovered plenty of those), but for pioneering a new scientific approach. As he recounts in his memoir In Search of Memory, Kandel...

On March 24th, surveillance cameras at the Taylor Made Jewelry store in Akron, Ohio captured the startling image of a red SUV crashing through the front windows with two masked men jumping out, smashing display cases, and stealing over $100,000 of jewelry in less than 2 minutes. Both men are...

Neil McLachlan says he wants to do for music what Apple did for the personal computer. For over two decades, the scientist, artist and university professor has worked to increase music participation. “Only five per cent of people (in the West) who go through tertiary music education end up...

“Society has a cultural bias towards extroverts.” – Susan Cain   Susan Cain is a former lawyer who quit Wall Street to write a book about how society is geared around extroverts at the expense of introverts and the wider economy. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a...

People are often unaware of their own ‘headline thinking’ and have not yet developed the ability to see past it The language one uses both indicates and influences the way one thinks. Without at least recognizing one’s own tendency to engage in ‘headline thinking’ — and...

Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being...

How do scientists reconstruct the climate of the past? They often turn to ice cores or growth rings from trees or deep-sea corals. But a new study gleans a wealth of weather intel from a largely untapped source: old documents. Researchers from Spain scoured manuscripts from 9th- and...

In his new book, Vijay Vaitheeswaran argues that we’re thinking about worldchanging innovation all wrong: It’s not going to come from where we expect it. Bottom-Up Solutions To Top-Down Problems => Deductive Reasoning to Solve How We Perceive the World   The world is currently...

To be a writer is, in effect, to be an editor as well. This is true whether you are the sort of writer who throws on the page everything that runs through your mind and later carves it into shape, or the sort that fashions and perfects every sentence before moving on to the next. It does not...

Location Tägermoos between Steckborn and Hörhausen. The crop circle in this photo is already 15 days old. For visitors the owner made additional paths which disfigure the image somewhat. The shape is just simple, but more than a few circles. It reminds of the double helix of DNA. Aerial shot...

Jonah Lehrer, in his book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, tells the story of how a handful of iconic creators each discovered an essential truth about the mind long before modern science was able to label and pinpoint it, makes a case for the extraordinary importance of the cross-pollination of...

IN A CULTURE that favors sensation, the fact checker is an anomaly, perhaps even anathema. He is the brakes on editors and writers racing toward deadline intent on dazzling readers at the expense of edifying them. He is the schoolmarm tsk tsking. He is the public defender for the...

It has been often said that it is only by gaining a true understanding of the past that we can ever hope to find the vital key to understanding its future and in turn, our own. The reality is that our distant history is still an enormous riddle. We only know what we do from the gradual piecing...

Living alone doesn’t mean being lonely   “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone ” by Eric Klinenberg “Going Solo” examines a dramatic demographic trend: the startling increase in adults living alone. Along the way, the book navigates some...

The past is another country — but an alternate history is a whole new world. The best alternate histories can make you see the real history of our world in a whole new way, and make you realize that events that seem like they were inevitable… may not have been. But an alternate history...

Nathan Myhrvold, CEO and Managing Director, Intellectual Ventures; Co-Author (with Bill Gates), The Road Ahead; Author, Modernist Cuisine   Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Everything That Ever Was, Available Forever. The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears...

Why did you choose go to sleep last night at the particular time you did? Maybe you were just plain tired. But, chances are, there were other factors involved in that decision, as well. Where you hoping to get a certain number of hours of rest before you had to get up and go to work? Maybe it...

Where were you when you first heard about the big bang? Was it a trip to planetarium? Was it at home watching a science documentary? When did you first learn that the world was made up of atoms? Was it in a middle school science class or a high school chemistry lesson? How did you first find...