Now that Russian scientists claim to have retrieved a vial of blood from a thawing wooly mammoth carcass from the permafrost of Siberia, the scientific community has been buzzing with speculation […]
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Very few countries allow direct-to-consumer advertising by drug companies, but in those that do (New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S.), the medicine-buying public has been brainwashed to believe that mental […]
Engineers at Oxford University, UK, have created an automated driving system that is currently being tested on private roads around the university and is accurate to a few centimeters.
The robot band cannot replicate the punk attitude of the Ramones or the soulfulness of B.B. King. Yet.
An aging man, a physician, learns he has Alzheimers. Determined to avoid the worst of it, he assembles a lethal collection of pills. As the next few years pass, the […]
The video below is a new public service announcement from the US FDA on the risks of drinking grapefruit juice when taking medication. We’ve known for over a couple of […]
The dual shockwaves of accelerating advances in space accessibility due to miniaturization and private sector competition have put NewSpace in the midst of a transformation.
If you thought the Internet of Things was a big idea, what about an Internet that connects humans with apes, elephants and dolphins? In what has to be one of the most […]
Ask most people to describe a “robot,” and they’d probably start to describe something vaguely human-looking, maybe something a little metallic or shiny with limbs. Something like the Roboy. Or WALL-E. Or […]
Recall Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), America’s “archprude” and upholder of Victorian morality. Comstock devoted his life to denouncing art he deemed “obscene, lewd or indecent.” In response to a New York […]
Recently I spoke to a conference of leading business school deans about the prospects of the MBA degree. My speech was entitled The Future has Come and Gone and You’ve […]
A short essay argues that most institutions should immediately institute moratoriums on hiring new faculty and building new facilities, and that universities need to focus on clarifying their value proposition in a world of ‘commodity [higher] education.’
Last night, the group of researchers responsible for the creation of the SPAUN project – that just published the first large scale model of a functioning brain to produce complex behaviours began […]
There’s much to criticise about this map of Pangea [1], but in spite of the geological anachronisms, it’s hard to tear your eyes away from it. The map shows a […]
Getting risk wrong leads to dangers all by itself, and we will remain vulnerable to these mistakes until we let go of our naïve post-Enlightenment faith in reason and accept that risk perception is inescapably an affective system, not just a matter of rationally figuring out the facts.
The New York Times reports that an MIT statistics professor has found that flying on a commercial jet has never been safer. Not that it was ever that much […]
You may have missed it, but on the Friday heading into the Christmas holiday, the FDA announced its decision about the safety of salmon genetically engineered to grow faster. After […]
Fellow pseudonymous neuroblogger Neuroskeptic(to whom I owe a great deal in inspiration) has published a fantastic piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ($) on the benefits to science of anonymity. Last November Neuroskeptic became […]
One of cartography’s most persistent myths: mapmakers of yore, frustrated by the world beyond their ken, marked the blank spaces on their maps with the legend Here be monsters. It’s […]
Consider one last autobiographical note before I answer the question: “How do we avoid the Sartre Fallacy?” I conducted an independent study my senior year that focused on biases and […]
According to The Independent, a recent Yale-Moscow State University study has found “a modest but statistically significant familiality and heritability element to creative writing.” The conclusion was based on an evaluation […]
A group from Singularity U’s Graduate Studies Program successfully flew a drone in Zero G gravity, cutting that cost by a factor of 10, and wants to utilize the drones for STEM education, 3D mapping.
If phantom islands can be discovered as recently as 2012, maybe there are still more of them out there.
Update (Jan, 2014): Amir’s patent application (search for no. 12/743357) has been rejected due to prior art by Mathews and MacLeod. Update (Feb, 2013): Following this blog post Amir corrected two […]
We pay special attention to the history of an object – where it has been, who created it, what touched it – because object’s history is what really matters when it comes to its value.
The idea of forgery resonates more than ever today in a culture in which “the open exchange of ideas has been rebranded as piracy.”
An article published in The Telegraph over a month ago remains on The Telegraph website with a headline that is so spectacularly incorrect that the BBC has reported that the article […]
Bloomberg recently asked me a few questions about the evolving role and capacity of the United Nations. With the 67th session of the UN General Assembly underway, I wanted to […]
DID YOU WATCH! Did your heart pound, your palms get sweaty, your muscles tense! Did you join the millions around the world gripped by fear and tension as Felix Baumgartner […]
Who will you put your money on — Richard Brandson, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk?