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?
The president’s 2013 budget asks for modest increases for some federal science agencies but trims funding to NASA. The request takes a deep bite out of Mars and outer-planet science exploration in particular. NASA’s funding would fall to the lowest level in four years, with a total budget of $17.71 billion. The president’s request projects…
Scientists have finally cracked a decades-old spaceflight riddle, figuring out why NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 probes began to slow mysteriously as they sped far from the sun. The cause of the so-called “Pioneer Anomaly,” it turns out, is heat coming from the electrical current flowing through the probes’ instrument and power systems. This heat…
We must learn how to become cooperative problem solvers to avoid the ecological and social self-destruction toward which we human beings are rushing headlong in a confounding variety of ways.
Sometimes, finding nothing is just as good as finding something. Physicists have made the most sensitive measurements yet in the hunt for a rare event that could undermine the dominant theory of particle physics, and turned up zilch. The scientists, who are searching for a rumored particle decay process called “neutrinoless double-beta decay,” ran a…
We’ve had two once-in-a-century storms within a decade. Hurricane Sandy seems likely to become the second-costliest storm in U.S. history, behind Hurricane Katrina. Lower Manhattan is struggling to recover from an unprecedented flood, and the New Jersey coast is smashed beyond recognition. Will we finally get the message? How, at this point, can anyone deny…
A new report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) highlights the world’s 25 most endangered primates. The report, entitled “Primates in Peril: The World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates, 2012–2014,” was put together by the Primate Specialist Group of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission and the International Primatological Society as well as the Conservation…