On May 3, the  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report showing that suicide among middle-aged Americans has risen substantially. Perverse coincidence perhaps, but that document arrived about a week after Hyundai Europe pulled an ad that sparked sustained outrage because it shows a guy trying to commit suicide with fumes from his [...]

  I went to a panel discussion at the New York Academy of Sciences on the evening of April 30th that addressed the topic of various forms of scientific malfeasance, ranging from plagiarism to outright manipulation of data. A gripping and deeply unsettling topic, as it relates directly to the research studies that I pore [...]

ScientificAmerican.com just ran an article on smartglasses. Not just the famous Google Glass, but a whole crop of smartglasses that are supposedly going to change everything: Big things afoot for the face in Tech Land. I dunno, this technology just doesn’t make sense to me. I could be wrong, along the lines of DEC chief [...]

Women in rural areas of the developing world often have to walk all day to get to a health clinic to retrieve the oral rehydration packets needed to treat their children’s diarrhea, a leading killer for those under the age of five. When they arrive, however, the medicine is often gone. The solution lies in [...]

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Twitter, both cultural mainstays that suffer at times from  acute alphanumeric ADHD, collided at ultra-high velocity on April 23 to induce an institutional chain reaction. The half life of the “flash crash” stretched a couple of minutes—and then the market came roaring back. But fewer than 140 characters sufficed [...]

Will the masses at NFL events do “the wave” only in the watchful sights of a police sharpshooter’s high-powered rifle? Is tailgating before the game all but nostalgic history? Will major marathons be relegated to a dull repetition of 105 or so loops around a stadium track? These are some of the questions that immediately [...]

People who lose a limb often experience the sensation of still having the missing arm or leg. Phantom limbs, in fact, have spurred a whole line of independent research among neuroscientists. But it appears that all of us may be  capable of these sensations, even if arms and legs remain intact. If we can conjure [...]

I recently saw The Social Network. It’s been out for years, but I usually wait until I can watch them in my living room for free. The take-home from that movie was that Facebook survived—it was the cool one—whereas other social media sites faltered because they didn’t “get it.” I know. It was just a [...]

Karl Deisseroth is a pioneer in optogenetics, the technology that has taken neuroscience by storm by enabling the use of optical and genetic methods to precisely control the switching on and off of individual neurons and brain circuits. Deisseroth and his team at Stanford have now come up with an entirely new method to explore [...]

Brain studies are  the current darling of the sciences, research capable of garnering  tens or even hundreds of millions in new funding for ambitious new projects, the kind of money that was once reserved only for big physics projects. Except the house of neuroscience, which attracts tens of thousands of attendees each year to the [...]