Back in February, we showcased some of science-artist Willy Chyr‘s stunning Neuroplastic Dreams. When I met Chyr here in Toronto those few months back, I wasn’t expecting the forthright clarity and modesty in his character that I encountered. Chyr is intelligent and fun. I’m pleased to share this interview with this vibrant talent. – - [...]

As the economy continues to chart its own tortuous, uncertain course, there seems to have been a fair amount of much-needed discussion on the kinds of skills new grads should possess. These skills of course have to be driven by market demand. As chemist George Whitesides asks for instance, what’s the point of getting a [...]

There’s a short rumination in this week’s Nature in which Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist from the University of California, Davis asks a question that often surfaces: Is the age of scientific genius over? Will we see another Einstein, Darwin or Newton or is the idea of the lone genius assiduously scribbling at his desk [...]

Freeman Dyson has a perspective in this week’s Science magazine in which he provides a summary of a theme he has explored in his book “The Sun, the Genome and the Internet”. Dyson’s central thesis is that scientific revolutions are driven as much or even more by tools than by ideas. This view runs somewhat [...]

Leo Szilard – brilliant, peripatetic Hungarian physicist, habitué of hotel lobbies, soothsayer without peer – first grasped the implications of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933 while stepping off the curb at a traffic light in London. Szilard has many distinctions to his name; not only did he file a patent for the first nuclear reactor [...]

The discovery of the Higgs boson (or the “Higgs-like particle” if you prefer) is without a doubt one of the signal scientific achievements of our time. It illustrates what sheer thought – aided by data of course – can reveal about the workings of the universe and it continues a trend that lists Descartes, Hume, [...]