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?
A bundle of recent genetic studies have suggested that modern humans had sex with Neanderthals thousands of years ago when the two populations roamed the planet alongside each other. However, the bones left behind by the two species don’t bear any obvious traces of interbreeding and a new study of monkeys in Mexico shows why…
In the past decade, astronomers have observed clay materials on Mars that seem to indicate large bodies of water once filled the Martian surface. But new research suggests that magma could form some of these slick deposits rapidly, and ancient Mars may not have been as wet as we thought. A region of French Polynesia…
Transhumanism does not say we will create posthumans, rather, it makes a moral claim: We ought to create posthumans. Creating posthumans is our best bet for avoiding harm.
Geological detectives are piecing together an intriguing seafloor puzzle. The Indian Ocean and some of its islands, scientists say, may lie on top of the remains of an ancient continent pulled apart by plate tectonics between 50 million and 100 million years ago. Painstaking detective work involving gravity mapping, rock analysis, and plate movement reconstruction…
It’s become a sport of sorts, predicting the low point of Arctic sea ice each year. Expert scientists with decades of experience do it but so do enthusiasts, whose guesses are gamely included in a monthly predictions roundup collected by Sea Ice Outlook, an effort supported by the U.S. government. When averaged, the predictions have…
Since 1799, the Royal Institution of Great Britain has occupied a grand building in London’s Mayfair, surrounded today by luxury shops and private art galleries. For many years, the building was a central part of British science. Michael Faraday dazzled crowds there in the nineteenth century with pyrotechnic displays of chemistry. In many respects, its…