David Gelernter, a pioneering computer scientist, foresaw the modern internet but thinks computers are still too hard to use
If there were a celebrity among brain chemicals, it would be dopamine. Supposedly released whenever we experience something pleasurable, it’s forever linked to salacious stories of sex, drugs and wild partying in the popular press. The Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters, it gives instant appeal to listless reporting and gives editors an excuse to drop some…
If we fail to understand and take care of the natural world, it can come back to haunt us in ways we know little about. A critical example is a developing model of infectious disease that shows that most epidemics — AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more that have occurred over…
Lab-grown egg cells could revolutionize fertility – and even banish menopause
Disgust – it’s an emotion we experience when we encounter things that are dirty, impure, or otherwise contaminated. From an evolutionary standpoint, experiencing the intense, visceral sense of revulsion that comes with disgust presumably helps us to avoid contaminants that can make us sick or even kill us. But new research suggests that disgust not…
Participants in a recent study who were instructed to try to visualize angels during states of lucid dreaming had, in some cases, succeeded in having experiences which seemed to parallel the encounters of Elijah and other Hebrew prophets with angelic messengers, as recorded in the Bible. The intensity of experience in lucid dreams is one…
Widely accepted theories of dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts, expect the solar neighborhood to be filled with the stuff – but it isn’t, at least as far as can be detected. This extra ingredient in the cosmos was originally suggested to explain…