Professor of psychology Michael Gazzaniga is spelling out a cautionary tale about the uses of neuroscience in society.
The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment, acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the gods. (“Inspiration” literally means “breathed upon.”) Even in modern times, scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity. But over the past decade, that…
Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science. A petition to remove references…
We’re about to get a better grasp of one of the biggest ideas in the universe: inflation. The first maps of the cosmos from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite are due out in early 2013. They should help us to hone descriptions of how, after the big bang, the universe grew from smaller than…
Blue whales perform underwater acrobatics to attack their prey from below, scientists have found. The massive mammals are known for lunge-feeding; gulping up to 100 tonnes of krill-filled water in less than 10 seconds. Using suction cup tags, researchers in Washington state have recorded the surprising manoeuvrability of the giants. They found that the whales…
Bending a black hole can juice it up. In extra dimensions, a black hole behaves like a fluid and a solid at the same time, and flexing the solid form may generate an electric field. Although these effects exist only in the theoretical realm, the underlying equations could help us puzzle out some of the…
At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents—with an answer that could rock…