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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

When this year’s Miss USA contestants responded to a question about the value of teaching evolution in public schools, one thing was clear: There is a raging debate between Religion and Evolution, and these women had firmly planted themselves on the Bible’s side. However, the snag in this...

Once upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet’s oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today. This strange picture...

When the Society for Neuroscience gets together for their annual meeting each year, a city of scientists suddenly forms for a week. This year’s meeting has drawn 31,000 people to the Washington DC Convention Center. The subjects of their presentations ranged from brain scans of memories to...

Despite Michael Crichton’s best efforts, the dinosaurs are still dead after 65 million years. While we know that much, what actually killed them off has been a matter up for continual debate. Some folks argue that the dino’s extinction was caused by a massive meteor impact, while others...