Seventy years after its invention, the Buckminster Fuller Institute has organized a competition challenging graphic designers, visual artists, and citizen cartographers to create a new and inspiring interpretation of the Dymaxion Map.
In a letter to the botanist Asa Gray written in 1860, a year after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wrote, “a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” His new theory of evolution by natural selection — or “the survival of the fittest,” as…
Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. Fortunately, new research suggests a simple antidote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction. A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic,…
SciAm excerpts Maria Konnikova’s “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes“: “It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science,” Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman once told an audience. Not only is that view patently false, but “it is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The…
Scientists are using video games to tap the collective intelligence of people around the world, while doctors and educators are turning to games to treat and teach. Games designed to tackle tough scientific problems are leading to breakthroughs in RNA structure, protein folding, genetic sequence alignment, and more.
A bird listening to birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience. “We found that the same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and…
This incredible image of fern spores is just one of the many mind-blowing images that won the Olympus BioScapes Imaging Competition in 2012. Check out the top ten images and videos captured by life-science researchers.
Neanderthals, or even older Homo erectus (“Upright Man”) might have sailed around the Mediterranean, stopping at islands such as Crete and Cyprus, new evidence suggests. The evidence suggests that these hominid species had considerable seafaring and cognitive skills. “They had to have had boats of some sort; unlikely they swam,” said Alan Simmons, lead author…
With the growth of online science networks, geography and economics no longer dictate how research is undertaken or published. Just as matchmaking sites connect romance-seekers based on their relationship compatibility, new academic social networks are connecting scientists based on their professional research interests. These sites obviously lack the general appeal of Facebook, which topped one…
The search for the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider at Cern has taken years of research and cost billions. It is a prime example of big money being spent on fundamental research into scientific principles, that critics say provides no answers to the problems the world faces today. In these austere times and…