David Gelernter, a pioneering computer scientist, foresaw the modern internet but thinks computers are still too hard to use
Two major organizations released climate change reports this month warning of doom and gloom if we stick to our current course and fail to take more aggressive measures. A World Bank report imagines a world 4 degrees warmer, the temperature predicted by century’s end barring changes, and says it aims to shock people into action…
A new study finds that diaries and writings from ninth-century Baghdad provide insight regarding strange weather from the era, which could allow scientists to better understand the planet’s weather history. The surviving documents were written by historians and scholars during the Islamic Golden Age between A.D. 816 and A.D. 1009. They represent one of the…
Amir D. Aczel blogs about physics and cosmology for Discover’s Crux: If somebody told you that there are angels floating in space, observing our world and forming their impressions of our everyday reality, you would think that this person is nuts—a religious fanatic with an active imagination, and certainly not a scientist. Scientists, as we…
Over at Edge.org, Harvard University physician and social scientist Nicholas A. Christakis discusses transformative changes in the social sciences in the 21st Century: These three things—a biological hurricane, computational social science, and the rediscovery of experimentation—are going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. With that change will come, in my judgment, a…
Marine scientists, planners and government officials say millions of mollusks planted in waters off New York and other cities could go a long way toward cleaning up America’s polluted urban environment. The oyster and other shellfish can slurp up toxins and eliminate decades of dirt. Landscape architect Kate Orff has a name for the work…
Global comparisons of scientific output are commonplace. As non-experts, policymakers and administrators must rely on indexes of impact and recognition — counts of published papers and citations, and the prestige of source journals — to assess the impact of public spending and to allocate research funds. The gold standard is the Scientific Citation Index Expanded,…