George Dyson talks with Martin Eiermann about the definition of life, human progress, and the importance of cognitive autarchy.
Many politically unstable areas of South Asia are “water-stressed,” meaning the areas are facing water scarcity due to poor infrastructure or simply lacking enough water to meet demand. The potential impacts of climate change on water scarcity could further inflame political tensions, finds a new report, “Himalayan Glaciers: Climate Change, Water Resources, and Water Security,”…
New work suggests constructing novel particle opens the door to taming the mysteries of quantum tunnelling.
Scientists have long gotten used to the idea that bodies are just genes’ ways of making more genes, survival machines that carry genes to the next generation. Think of a salmon struggling upstream just to expend its body (now expendable) in spawning. Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel’s idea is that cultures are an extension of this:…
For much of the 20th century, the question of building mind from matter was considered so difficult that consciousness was a topic non grata. The Behaviorist school of thought held that consciousness was an illusion: The brain was to be understood simply as an input-output black box of reflexes, and that’s where the investigation must…
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…
The mammoth storm that caused severe flooding, damage and fatalities to the eastern U.S. will raise pressure on Congress and the next president to address the impacts of climate change as the price tag for extreme weather disasters escalates. Hurricane Sandy devastated the east coast of the United States, claiming dozens of lives so far,…