Advocates of free will can rest easy, for now. A 30-year-old classic experiment that is often used to argue against free will might have been misinterpreted.
Several recent thought-provoking papers from the Future Visions group have inspired me to offer some thoughts from a "female perspective". As an observational astronomer and a Christian, I found myself in consonance with many views expressed in Bernard Haisch’s contribution "Freeing the Scientific Imagination from Fundamentalist Scientism" (although I disagree that strident debunking is exclusively…
Two species of worms have the same set of 20 neurons that control their foregut (a digestive organ located, naturally, near the front end of the worm. The way those neurons are wired, though, completely changes their behavior. Caenorhabditis elegans eats bacteria, while its worm cousin Pristionchus pacificus, while able to subsist on bacteria, also…
The world’s largest particle accelerator is roaring along at an unprecedented pace, delivering torrents of data to its physicist handlers. But the hundreds of millions of collisions happening inside the machine every second are now growing into a thick fog that, paradoxically, threatens to obscure a fabled quarry: the Higgs boson. The problem is known…
It’s a wilderness out there in outer space. And as robotic surrogates set the stage for human footprints on Mars and other planetary bodies, just how much respect for other worlds should we have? One suggested response would establish planetary parks for the solar system, an answer that ties together space science and exploration, ethics,…
The “remarkable recent economic growth” in many African countries may be able to sustain science through domestic funding (rather than through external sources) — but a lack of scientists and research capacity is threatening to reel back that economic growth, a meeting has heard. The gross domestic product (GDP) of many African countries has been…
Scientists have been exploring the idea that we are all governed by two disparate existential systems, each with its own distinct method of processing the idea of death. Both existential minds have the power to meaningfully change our attitudes and actions, but they work in very different—almost opposite—ways. One of our systems of existential thinking…