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Since ancient times, humans have been fascinated with ways to alter consciousness, and have gone to great lengths to reach a "higher" ground. From naturally occurring substances such as opium and betel nuts, to synthetic drugs like LSD, people have long experimented with mind-altering substances...
New Zealand’s kea* are among the most devastatingly intelligent birds on the planet. For instance, animal cognition researchers say kea are as smart as crows at solving mechanical puzzles...
Since the rise of recordings and radio in the early twentieth century, music has been a constant and often integral part of American culture. Any comprehensive account of the history of the last one hundred years requires at least some understanding of how music fits into the picture...
Not all of history's most significant scientists were college graduates when they began their works. In fact, history is full of scientists who have shaped the world due to their work as teenagers...
I have often wondered about whether key human adaptations (e.g., bipedalism, large brain size, opposable thumbs) represented universal traits for the development of high intelligence and technological complexity...
Science can be risky business, but it is important to know what those risks are. It is established wisdom that we need to experiment on viruses, for example, to better defend against emerging infectious diseases...
Losing money is one of the loneliest feelings. It was Oct 22nd, 2008. Lehman Brothers, the investment bank, had filed for bankruptcy the month before.
With much progress being made in nanotechnology, the future of computers has two directions: nanotechnology and cells. Nanotechnology is the engineering of a system at the molecular scale...
Editor's note (11/7/13): Find the entry point and new posts of Bob Grumman's M@h*(pOet)?ica at http://poeticks.com/ #StorySaturday is a Guest Blog weekend experiment in which we invite people to write about science in a different, unusual format – fiction, science fiction, lablit, personal story, fable, fairy tale, poetry, or comic strip...
“But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?” in “The Time Machine” by Herbert George Wells, 1895.Thanks to Albert Einstein’s work on special relativity in the early 1900s, physicists have accepted time as the fourth dimension along with the three dimensions of space...
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