“Nissim”, a 64 year old man, knows that the word for the eldest son in a family is the “firstborn”, but he says that snow is pink and that we wear coats on our feet. A stroke left him unable to talk about anything except abstract concepts. The case of Nissim is reported in a…
The life of Ferdinand Tonnies, German sociologist and political activist, is a testament to the dramatic social changes which swept across Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in 1855 to a wealthy farmer at the northern fringe of the German empire, Tonnies spent his childhood working on the family estate, sharing close quarters…
As many of you know, I’m fortunate enough to live in a city that values science and scientific knowledge so highly that the our local news station, KGW, routinely brings on scientists to talk about the lastest developments in our endeavors to understand the Universe around us. Just last week, I was invited to share…
Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. Fortunately, new research suggests a simple antidote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction. A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic,…
What’s the point of the humanities? Of studying philosophy, history, literature and “soft” sciences like psychology and poly sci? The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, consisting of academic, corporate, political and entertainment big shots, tries to answer this question in a big new report to Congress. The report is intended to counter plunging…
Ray Kurzweil’s dream of internal nanobots floating around our bloodstream making us immortal by eradicating diseases and slowing down the aging process may actually be a reality sooner than any of us ever thought. Nick Bilton of the New York Times recently reported on two different companies – Proteus Digital Health and HQ – that…
If our universe slammed into a neighboring one during a growth spurt in its first second, the collision would have left a mark. And Matthew Kleban thinks he sees it in the most detailed snapshot yet taken of the dawn of the universe. The satellite image, released by astronomers in March, confirmed what an earlier…
I don’t mean our private lives, our personal choices and hopes, the plans we make along the years. I imagine that each and every one of us believes our lives do have a purpose, or many. What I mean is life as a natural phenomenon, this strange assembly of matter endowed with autonomy, capable of…
Imagine taking a map of a city, shredding it into 7,400 pieces, and then putting it back together. You have to align the landmarks, fix any tear or rip you’ve created in the process, and make sense of any shred you might have lost. Now imagine doing the same to a preserved human brain. That’s…
When the Large Hadron Collider went online in 2009, most scientists saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to conduct experiments involving the building blocks of the physical world. But to Stanislav Shalunov, a networking engineer, it looked like a whole a new kind of Big Data problem. A few years before the LHC went live,…