Jeff is ready to get married. As an Orthodox Jew, Jeff* is not leaving anything to chance: He prays every morning that he will find a wife, attends big religious singles events and maintains active profiles on three different Jewish dating sites. For people like Jeff who are seeking romance and marriage on the web,…
The president’s 2013 budget asks for modest increases for some federal science agencies but trims funding to NASA. The request takes a deep bite out of Mars and outer-planet science exploration in particular. NASA’s funding would fall to the lowest level in four years, with a total budget of $17.71 billion. The president’s request projects…
Since 1995, astronomers have been hunting in earnest for possible havens for life outside the solar system. So far, they’ve detected more than 550 extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. Another 2,000-plus possible planets are waiting in the wings for confirmation. Researchers are working on ways to identify a “potentially Earth-like” planet – even if it isn’t…
The ancient Greeks called it “the madness of the gods”; the author Sherwood Anderson dubbed it “the divine accident of life.” But as it turns out, love is neither madness nor an accident. The more we understand how the brain works, the more it seems we are programmed for love, just as we’re programmed to…
Over the years of writing and teaching, I have tried to free myself of constraints I felt, limits to the range of exploration I could make, to the kind of intuition I could credit. I realized gradually that my own religion, and religion in general, could and should disrupt these constraints, which amount to a…
When an oncoming hurricane curves offshore — as most do — we usually breathe a sigh of relief. But soon, those offshore storms might give us something more to worry about. Offshore hurricanes could demolish half the turbines in proposed wind farms just off the USA’s coastlines, according to a recent study in the Proceedings…
If someone in 2012 wants to criticize Henry Ford because he didn’t know everything about automobiles a century ago, it’s a little silly. He knew what he knew given the science and the technology of his day – he revolutionized his field. Freud got a lot wrong about psychology but he created the only unified…
You may have noticed that when you think positively, you tend to feel more relaxed and energetic. When you are upset, you are more likely to feel tired and lazy. These sensations are not coincidental. The way we think strongly affects our physical state. The endocrine system is the powerhouse that regulates our moods. The…
Just in time for Charles Darwin’s 203rd birthday, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled the first phase of its online Darwin Manuscripts Project, a collection of more than 15,000 digitized manuscript pages and thousands of other documents drawn from Cambridge University Library, the Biodiversity Heritage Library and other institutions around the world. Among the…
We are afloat on a hidden ocean of equations. They are at work in transport, the financial system, health and crime prevention and detection, communications, food, water, heating and lighting. Step into the shower and you benefit from equations used to regulate the water supply. Your breakfast cereal comes from crops that were bred with…