Robby Berman
Contributing Writer
I’m a writer, musician, and father living in central New York with my wife, two daughters, one dog, two cats, and countless questions. I’m especially interested in animal rights, creativity, politics, the nature of things and time, and in making a worthwhile contribution. You can follow me @everyrobby.
David McCandless hilarious classification of modern device-dependent, internet-obsessed mental disorders.
Biologist Stuart Firestein talks about the connection between smells, tastes, and memory.
Scientists are finding that loneliness has real medical consequences, and the brain sees it as pain.
Shelby Harris explains what can go wrong when the safety mechanism that shuts down your body during dreaming fails.
A neuroscientific approach to maintaining emotional well-being.
Add to playlist! Stanford University posts its Ho Center for Buddhist Studies series of talks on YouTube.
Author David Shenk explains how we frequently misinterpret the meaning of IQ scores.
Scientists show that brainless organisms can somehow learn and share knowledge.
The KIND foundation discovers seven people doing inspiring things for others.
Daryl Davis has made a point of meeting Ku Klux Klan members and 200 members have quit the racist organization after getting to know him.
Louis Menand discusses the downright weird way we care about fictional characters we know perfectly well aren’t really real.
Journalist Eric Schlosser reports that the president isn’t actually the only American who can launch a nuclear attack all by himself or with one other person.
Jonathan Coulton’s song “The Future Soon” is a sly commentary on our romantic dreams of a better future.
Extreme “river in the sky” climate events nearly wiped out the local population of a keystone species, the Olympia oyster.
A new study says running enhances connectivity in areas of the brain associated wth high-level thinking.
Overly powerful synthetic marijuana-imitating drugs causes dozens of smokers to hit the streets of Brooklyn in a daze.
A new study finds that non-human primates have the vocal tract required for human-type speech.
NASA debuted its own Giphy channel packed with gifs of the their missions and research.
The just-passed federal Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act makes it illegal for ticket scalpers to acquire tickets using software bots.
A new study finds that having a single extra chromosome may reduce the chance of cancerous tumors. But like everything, it’s a balancing act.
China is is upsetting many of its people by forcibly exhuming the dead to clear space for development.
MRI study finds brains of ASD subjects are more symmetrical than typical brains, which makes sense.
Amazon announces a new type of smart brick-and-mortar shopping with no checkouts.
Cognitive scientist Donald H. Hoffman asserts that not only do we invent our own personal views of reality, it’s an evolutionary necessity.
A massive chart of humankind’s 113 spacecraft so far and where they’ve gone.
A researcher is experimenting with an artificial hippocampus to learn how to strengthen and store memories.l
The first clinical trials on humans of CRISPR-Cas9-edited genes has begun in China.
Scientists explain why explosive, disruptive magnetic reconnections occur so mystifyingly often.
Biologists debate adding a controversial new aspect to the understanding of evolution.
An upcoming, massive “atlas of the underworld” will allow geologists to rewind geologic time.