Not if we could work a way around our boredom, it could be a very different kind of future waiting for us   If you imagine yourself as an elf, live along side with men, dwarves, goblins and orcs, and any nasty creatures of Middle Earth for thousands of years, you might get frustrated...

“We all wonder why we don’t look like, act like, feel like everybody else. Each of our brains has the exact same parts. The Cortex, Hypothalamus, Fornix, Septal Nucleus so on.. and yet.. no two brains are exactly alike. So being different.. Being unique.. is undeniably a...

I believe that this presentation is not just theory; it is fact.  We live in a world, a galaxy, and a universe of six dimensions.  The physics used today do not reflect the last two dimensions and are thus limited in theory, especially where and when different fields are involved.  With six...

The Big Rip Theory might be the scariest scenario for the end of everything we’ve come across. That the universe will just tear itself apart.   Most experts believe the amount of matter in the universe will cause the expansion of the universe to slow down — and the universe may...

Without it, the evolution of ideas can’t take place. In order to choose the best ideas, we must be able to debate all ideas equally and freely. No doubt most of us are tired of dealing with President Zuma’s penis. But the important issue of “dignity” versus “free expression” was...

At some point, the Mongol military leader Kublai Khan (1215–94) realized that his empire had grown so vast that he would never be able to see what it contained. To remedy this, he commissioned emissaries to travel to the empire’s distant reaches and convey back news of what he owned....

  Will you be any worse off the moment humans cease to speak in Aragonese? How about Navajo, or Ojibwa? Or Koro, a language only just discovered in a tiny corner of northeast India? No, you probably wouldn’t, not in that moment. But humanity would be. Science, art and culture would...

If there’s one thing everyone knows about mountains—and given the state of geography education today, that may be a pretty accurate estimate—it’s that Mount Everest, in the Himalayas, is the Earth’s highest point. But what if it wasn’t? What if Everest, with its famous 29,029-foot...

All countries have a high point and a low point, elevationally speaking, but “high” and “low” can be very relative terms. The lowest point of hilly Uganda, for example, would still tower four hundred feet above Cathedral Hill, the highest point of low-lying Uruguay. What country do you...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization in charge of maintaining the Internet’s address system, opened the floodgates to a giant new stable of Internet addresses. You see, for over a decade, we’ve been stuck with a rather measly assortment of generic top...

Geo-engineering schemes are projects designed to tackle the effects of climate change directly, usually by removing CO2 from the air or limiting the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface. Although large-scale geo-engineering is still at the concept stage, advocates claim that...

Rosie Redfield (who blogs on this network) has just published a careful and decisive rebuttal to the “arsenic bacteria” fiasco in collaboration with a group at Princeton. The paper which will appear in Science is under embargo for now, but there is a copy available at that bastion...

An Interview with Author Stan Cox   It hit 95 degrees in Chicago on Monday, making it the hottest Memorial Day in the city’s history. The temperature generated a number of heat warnings instructing individuals to avoid the outdoors while staying in air conditioned spaces. Are we now so...

Modern humans have created many thousands of distinct cultures. So what will it mean if globalization turns us into one giant, homogenous world culture?   Stroll into your local Starbucks and you will find yourself part of a cultural experiment on a scale never seen before on this planet....

It is gratifying when people see you just as you want to be seen. But don’t count on it. If you like to think of yourself as a gentle person of few words others may nevertheless find you boring and pathetic. You may like to think of yourself as curious and passionate about ideas, while...

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...

These days, spotting the future requires a different set of tools. There’s an infinite amount of ink and pixels spilled on most any topic. So how do we spot the future—and how might you? The seven rules that follow are not a bad place to start pinpointing the inventions and trends that...

The “dangerous” realisation that there is no top-down meaning; that our actions aren’t found to be important by anyone (or One) other than ourselves. This idea destroyed and continues to destroy many ideas I embraced (and that I encounter). Based on this, one must ask what follows. One...

Investigating what is right or wrong often leads one into territory demarcated as a No-Man’s Land, to places forbidden, to territory thought too harsh, horrible or “dangerous” to explore. I am not smart enough to be a discoverer of these countries, but more a cartographer, mapping out...

What our sense connectedness has to do with the osmosis of rationality and intuition   “Some of the most creative leaps ever taken by the human mind are decidedly irrational, even primal. Emotive forces are what drive the greatest artistic and inventive expressions of our species. How...

Energy is a fundamental necessity for life, let alone a vigorous society or civilization. This fact has been recognized by humans for a very long time — Sun, Wind, Fire and Water (in the form of rivers and waterfalls and rain), worshipped by most cultures, are manifestations of energy in one...

The idea of being a parent should be thought through more carefully. When we assess the idea, it is clear that, given the current conditions of the world, there is no reason to create more children   I proposed this argument in 2010 and received vitriolic replies, which brought more heat...

It started when I was a child and has never stopped since then: the desire to know things and to question. I am in no sense a gifted person; this desire exists in every child in the world. But what stops many from following their natural curiosity is forceful indoctrination from their parents...

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...

What clues to the way we live today will archaeologists unearth in the millennia to come? What will endure, and what will fade away?   When humans in the far future are piecing together a picture of the primitive civilisation of 2012, archaeology will surely be the best way to go about...

If climate change continues along the business-as-usual path, the 24th century’s new world will be in some ways more like the world of Ancient Greece – with what’s left of the world’s inhabitants trading around a single sea. For the Ancient Greeks, it was the Mediterranean Sea. For...

New research reveals more clues as to why our ginger brethren seem, well, just a little bit different. Specifically, redheads appear to feel pain differently. While redheads are more sensitive to the cold, they appear to have a higher pain threshold than the rest of us. A recent study showed...

The more optimistic we are about the future of our species the better we can focus on today’s challenges In the 21st century, it can feel as if the future has already arrived. But we’re only getting started. It’s fashionable to be pessimistic about our prospects, yet our...

Stopping the internet isn’t impossible, but it’s unlikely any time soon   In a statement posted online last month, hacker collective Anonymous announced plans to shut down the internet. Yes, you read that right. Operation Global Blackout, planned for March 31, is apparently a protest...

Primates, philosophers, and how subjectivity ensures the absolute truth of our existence.   What does it mean to be human? Centuries worth of scientific thought, artistic tradition and spiritual practice have attempted to answer this most fundamental question about our existence. And yet...

Next supercontinent will form over the Arctic Ocean   Over the next few hundred million years, the Arctic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea will disappear, and Asia will crash into the Americas forming a supercontinent that will stretch across much of the Northern Hemisphere. That’s the...

Some of the iconic winter landscapes by Pieter Breughel the Elder rank not only as fine examples of 16th century Dutch art. Paintings such as Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565) also serve as vivid evidence for the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of cold climate conditions and glacier...

Andrei Linde, Father of “Eternal Chaotic Inflation”; Professor of Physics, Stanford University   “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” This is one of the most famous quotes from Albert Einstein. “The fact that it is...

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...

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,...

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,...

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...