By now, you’ve probably seen all of the hullaboo on the SciAm site about the launch of the Scientific American MIND blogs. New and old bloggers are teaming up here to write about all things wonderful and strange on psychology, neuroscience, and culture. I’m excited for all the new blogs (go check them out!) and [...]

Every musician’s dream is to travel the world, be critically acclaimed, and be able to listen to four different pieces of music simultaneously. Alright, so maybe that last part is a bit more of a pipe dream than the first two. However, this highly unusual simultaneous listening ability is a skill that ragtime pianist Bob [...]

ScienceOnline is a conference put on by Karyn Traphagen, Anton Zuiker, and our own Bora Zivkovic. I’ve been going since I first stumbled across it in 2010, making this year the fourth time I’ve attended. Over the years the conference has managed to expand and change while keeping its original spirit of inclusiveness, discovery, collaboration, [...]

Just about everyone appreciates music, but music that results from a creative implementation of sound can be especially compelling. Human beings are inventive creatures who discover a myriad of ways to innovate in the musical realm. This video preview of Landfill Harmonic, a documentary shot in a slum in Paraguay shows that people can find [...]

Dear Readers, it’s been quite awhile since I last wrote. In the intervening time, North Carolina Central University deemed me a Master of Biology, I traveled to see friends and family, and I moved to Madison, Wisconsin to start school in the Neuroscience and Public Policy program (NPP) at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. [...]

One year ago today, the Scientific American Blog network launched. I’ve been so honored for the opportunity to write for you over the past year. You know a little bit about me, but today I want to know more about you! I’m always a little curious about who is reading my blog and what they [...]

Virginia Woolf. John Keats. Emily Dickinson. Edgar Allen Poe. All are considered brilliant writers, and all were considered to be mad. Quotes from these great writers flashed on the screen as the event opened. The one that most struck me came from Poe, “Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not [...]

On the first night of the World Science Festival, I took a train to the gorgeous Union Palace Theater in Washington Heights to see a truly unique performance. I squeezed myself into the balcony among many children and their parents just as Columbia University physics professor Brian Greene was excitedly giving an introduction to the [...]

The 2012 World Science Festival runs from May 30 – June 3, and I am here in New York City attending some of the events. Last night I got the chance to attend Icarus at the Edge of Time, a film that featured a score composed by Philip Glass and performed live by Orchestra of [...]

I’ve been swamped lately with finishing up my master’s thesis and have been tweeting occasional gripes and self-created hashtags about the process. #thesisjams might not be inspiring to anyone besides me, but what if all my tweets about the process were unwittingly being turned into public music? The Listening Machine is a project by composer [...]