The Marketplace in Your Brain
Neuroscientists have found brain cells that compute value. Why are economists ignoring them?
Neuroscientists have found brain cells that compute value. Why are economists ignoring them?
Once again quantum physics gives us philosophical implications: physicists showed how a small amount of randomness can be amplified without limit. Classical physics is deterministic: for example, we can determine the position and velocity of a particle at any time in the future. Quantum theory, on the other hand, states that there exist processes which…
Science is getting bigger. Just about every scientific discipline — astronomy, conservation, drug development, genetics, neuroscience, physics — is organizing massive collaborations of researchers in the name of reaching massive goals. These so-called Big Science efforts have big budgets, big lists of participating institutions, big press coverage, and big pronouncements. Big Science isn’t new (the…
Wind speeds over the Southern Ocean have been increasing over the past three decades and those stronger winds are boosting birds in the area to faster flying speeds, according to new research. The wind speed shift is linked to climate change in the study, which was published in the latest issue of Science. The impact,…
British children are losing contact with nature at a “dramatic” rate, and their health and education are suffering, a National Trust report says. Traffic, the lure of video screens and parental anxieties are conspiring to keep children indoors, it says, resulting in a “nature deficit disorder”. Evidence suggests the problem is worse in the U.K….
Researchers have encoded a form of rewritable memory into DNA. The arduous work involved in building the system is almost as notable as the achievement itself, says Drew Endy of Stanford University in California who led the work, which is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Synthetic biologists have long sought to…
There are certain laws of nature everyone accepts. The surest way to bring about rain on an overcast day is to leave your umbrella at home. Is your line at the grocery store moving too slowly? Switch lines. That will definitely speed it up (minus you). And if you’ve hit a series of green traffic…