Commentary invited by editors of Scientific American
It takes a lot to bump the United States election out of the national spotlight one week before election day. Hurricane Sandy was that big, a direct blow to the most heavily populated region of the country...
In the early 1990s, a team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma made a surprising discovery: Certain groups of neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys fired not only when a monkey performed an action – grabbing an apple out of a box, for instance – but also when the monkey watched someone else performing that action; and even when the monkey heard someone performing the action in another room.In short, even though these “mirror neurons” were part of the brain's motor system, they seemed to be correlated not with specific movements, but with specific goals.Over the next few decades, this “action understanding” theory of mirror neurons blossomed into a wide range of promising speculations...
My evening plan to read Harry Potter for the first time (I know!) was thwarted by Linton Weeks’s thought-provoking post on the right of plants to evolve.
There are many ways a woman reacts as she pushes out her baby. One patient couldn’t stop laughing as the baby crowned. One screamed for ten minutes (no epidural).
Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, made a comment the other day that really captured the essence of the monster hybrid storm, Hurricane Sandy: "This thing is stitched together from elements (both) natural and unnatural." Most elements of this storm have indeed been observed in the past without any need for invoking global climate change as a causative agent...
Though the free-market faithful have long preached that competition creates efficiency, as if it were a law of nature, nature itself teaches a different lesson.
A court in Italy has convicted six scientists and one civil defense official of manslaughter in connection with their predictions about an earthquake in l’Aquila in 2009 that killed 309 people...
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...
New Orleans, October 16, 2012 - You walk into a bar and music is thumping. All heads are bobbing and feet tapping in synchrony. Somehow the rhythmic sound grabs control of the brains of everyone in the room forcing them to operate simultaneously and perform the same behaviors in synchrony...
Ask this question, and you will probably receive one of two responses: Yes. People choose to be gay. They are making an immoral choice, which government should discourage.
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