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What about nature's “lies?” Notice that wild rice grows naturally almost as a monoculture, not mixed with other plant species. Tropical forests, on the other hand, have much greater species diversity.
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In the future, scientists may be relying on open-source projects and data sharing. As you well know, not everyone wants to share. Why do scientists lock up their data?
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When people ask why I would choose to write a book about poisons (The Poisoner’s Handbook) I usually start with my brief stint as a chemistry major, my continuing affection for using poisons as a way to think about our chemical planet.
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In the summer of 2007, while the scientist Marc Hauser was in Australia, Harvard University authorities entered his lab on the tenth floor of William James Hall, seizing computers, videotapes, unpublished manuscripts and notes.
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One hundred years ago, an American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to measure the intensity of a pepper’s burn. The scale – as you can see on the widely used chart below – puts sweet bell peppers at the zero mark and the blistering habenero at up to 350,000 Scoville Units.
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The drive to develop and expand alternatives to fossil fuel engages scientists and entrepreneurs around the world at levels never before witnessed. Increasingly, consumers are being urged to imagine a future when their vehicles and commercial machinery are powered not just by gasoline or traditional diesel but also by liquid biofuels
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Aliens have nothing but contempt for us, or they love us. Oddly, they don’t seem to be indifferent to us (how could anyone be?), though this is surely the best explanation for the apparent absence of signals, given – so the calculations go – that there are at least ten billion planets in the universe capable of producing intelligent life.
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People have told Jack Horner he’s crazy before, but he has always turned out to be right. In 1982, on the strength of seven years of undergraduate study, a stint in the Marines, and a gig as a paleontology researcher at Princeton, Horner got a job at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.
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In our Science paper, Pacala and I envisioned a world where "policies … would inevitably be renegotiated periodically to take into account results of R&D, experience with specific wedges, and revised estimates of the size of the Stabilization Triangle."
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Perception entails not just sensing the world but also making sense of it. When you listen to orchestral music, you hear oboes, violins, timpani and so on, each playing distinct notes.
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The only way to start this story is by opening a door – the door leading into the Loony Gas building. The workers at the Standard Oil Refinery in New Jersey, gave the building that name, waving goodbye to their colleagues when they entered the shadowed opening
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For many years now, I have spent hours describing to friends and family members why I study primates and why it fits within the field of anthropology.
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Jaron Lanier, of virtual-reality fame, was permitted to hold forth a few years ago in a Discover blog space on the topic of 'morphing' in molluscs. The result is messy.
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“Drug Makers Cut Out Goodies for Doctors” and “Drugmakers Pulling Plug on Free Pens, Mugs & Pads” read headlines in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Health Blog at the end of 2008.
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The first Tektite mission, in 1969, comprised four men and was submerged for two months. In exchange for the opportunity to study marine ethology and ecological systems from a two-chamber capsule fifty feet below the surface of the sea
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It’s not often that you find something that’s a fallacy both logically and creatively — that is, a fallacy to which both researchers and artists are susceptible.
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In the United States, the job market for people with doctorates in physics collapsed around 1970, as the huge post-Sputnik expansion of American university hiring and military spending came to an abrupt halt.
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It was the late seventies and I had just graduated from University in Britain. The economy was depressed, the country was strike-bound and rainy. On the spur of the moment I married my girlfriend and took a teaching job in distant, exotic, sun-dappled Argentina.
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The common view of viruses, mostly true, is of tiny burglars that sneak into cells, grab the biosynthetic controls and compel the cell to make huge numbers of progeny that break out of the cell and keep the replication cycle going.
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One of the real challenges facing the interpretation of ancient astronomies—from non-academic '2012' prophecies to the most traditional scholarship on the Dresden Codex Venus Table—is that presented by ‘patterns in randomness.’
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Erez Lieberman Aiden is a talkative witty fellow, who will bend your ear on any number of intellectual topics. Just don’t ask him what he does. “This is actually the most difficult question that I run into on a regular basis,” he says. “I really don’t have anything for that.”
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by Charles LaPorte
If the Bible was best viewed as poetry, many felt, modern poetry could also come to serve a cultural role like that traditionally held by scripture. In this context, it should surprise us little to see Robert Browning addressed by his admirers as God’s very mouthpiece, or Alfred Tennyson spoken of as a veritable prophet.
by Rex Veeder
As a student of rhetoric, I was introduced to Marshall McLuhan in one or two classes during the 60s and 70s but the introduction was brief – more like having a family member introduce you to an uncle from Canada who, although he was family, somehow didn’t fit in. He was inappropriate. 
by Nico Slate
Connections between Indian and African American freedom struggles go well beyond the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The Montgomery Story comic book was published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group that by the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been working for decades to translate Gandhian methods for use in the struggle for racial equality in the United States.
by Leslie Paul Thiele
We are in the midst of an extinction crisis that rivals any in the last 65 million years. And we are altering the planet’s climate. But as we begin to accept the burden of responsibility for our actions, we are also reinforcing a false image of our species. 
by Philip Kitcher
It may seem that treating ethics as a human phenomenon, as a work-in-progress, undermines its authority. Without absolute commands, is everything permitted? Why, if the ethical maxims that currently govern our lives have emerged in this way, should we obey them? To say that ethics is founded in the command of God – or the dictates of Reason, for that matter – doesn’t help. 
by Tamar Aylat-Yaguri
It would be a contradiction to claim that both man and God could be simultaneously right and just. Either God is in the wrong (and there is no theodicy) or man is in the wrong, always in the wrong, and there is theodicy. 
by Keith and Orrin Pilkey
If the vast majority of scientists believe that humans are directly contributing to climate change, then why do polls show that fewer Americans today see global warming as a serious threat than they did two years ago? This public opinion phenomenon is directly attributable to groups motivated to misinform the public. 
by Nicholas Rombes
The vague commune in Martha Marcy May Marlene exists as a sort of unfulfilled dream. As with the other Occupy Zeitgeist films, the deceptively shambling narrative structure hints at a fantasy of disorder, the disorder of the natural world in the heart of a city, a desire not to dismantle the dominant social structures, but to circumvent it altogether. 
by John Beverley
There are many, and often deep, differences among the new governments of the left in Latin America, but in my opinion they do not resolve themselves into a neat dichotomy, which has the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is an important emerging contradiction in the Pink Tide, but it is one within the governments of the Tide rather than between them. 
by Junko Kitanaka
Suicide has long been a site of conceptual struggle for psychiatrists, who have encountered resistance from lay Japanese holding on to the cultural notion of suicide as a morally positive act of self-determination, carried out at times as a protest against social injustice. 
by Jonathan Lear
On the face of it, a conception does not seem the sort of thing it is easy to lose. If we think of our life with concepts in terms of our ways of going on, categorizing and thinking about the phenomena in the world, including ourselves, then it makes sense that certain concepts might lose their viability for us, and thus fall out of use.
by James Joyce
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. Most Popular
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