The Power of Nothing
Could studying the placebo effect change the way we think about medicine?
Could studying the placebo effect change the way we think about medicine?
In the wake of the passing of pioneering astronaut Neil Armstrong, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, tweeted that men walking on the moon was “The only positive event in the last 50 yrs for which everyone remembers where they were when it happened.” So after Armstrong, what’s next for space…
Wonder and amazement at the natural world inspire many blog posts, projects, and even careers in science, but it’s rare that you’ll see wonder break through the soul-crushing passive voice of the scientific literature. It wasn’t always this way, of course. In Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, historians of science Lorraine Daston and…
A second term frees the President to end his climate change silence and perhaps spur on a global deal, but he still needs to win Republican support on Capitol Hill
The supply of children in U.S. foster care far exceeds the demand for their adoption. Indeed, only one in five children is adopted from foster care in the United States. Not only do the circumstances leading to the surrender of children to the state continue unabated (negligence, abuse, poverty, drug addiction of the parents), but…
Defining life poses a challenge that’s downright philosophical. There’s no ambiguity in looking for water, because we have a clear definition of it. That definition is the same whether you’re on Earth, on Mars, or in intergalactic space. It is the same whether you’re dealing with water as ice, liquid, or vapor. But there is…
An entirely new type of particle has been discovered by scientists using the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland. The discovery of the new particle, called “neutral Xi_b^star baryon,” was made by the CMS experiment, one of six separate particle physics experiments running at the LHC….