Kafka, Proust, James Joyce: just a few of many authors who preferred to write through the night. While you’re not going to pen the next Ulysses simply by starting after nightfall, there is new evidence to suggest that sleepy brains think more freely — and that…
Considering that we skipped right over winter this year in New York, everyone seems to be talking about climate change lately: “Can you believe this weather? Thanks, global warming!” But while we urbanites conveniently ignore melting ice caps and freak tornadoes in favor of balmy…
On Sunday, Edge posted 192 responses to their annual question. This year’s query, suggested by Steven Pinker, was “WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?” The responses—from CEOs, artists, inventors, journalists, and scientists of all kinds—are rich and diverse. You’ll find the usual…
In what can only be called an incredible feat of conservation technology, a 1,000 year old text by Archimedes is now on view at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. “The exhibition, ‘Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes,’ which opened Sunday, tells the story…
Last year geneticist Craig Venter made news when, according to Forbes, he “announced that he and a team at his eponymous institute have created a genetic code synthetically and inserted it into a bacterium called Mycoplasma capricolum.” At SXSW this month (via Forbes), Venter described two…
A Mount Holyoke College physics professor, Mark Peterson, argues that Galileo Galilei‘s love of poetry and artistic impulses played a critical role in his revolutionary re-imagination of the cosmos. At the age of 24, after dropping out of medical school, Galileo gave a lecture on…
They’ve become, over the last six months, one of those bothersome things New York’s subway riders have learned to put up with: proselytizers for the Church of Scientology, “stationed at red-clothed tables in Times Square and several other subway hubs,” where, “In addition to using…
In his forthcoming book, The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil says “the inevitable next step in the evolutionary process,” an “end-of-humantime event” he calls The Singularity, will take place sometime around mid-century. So what is it? As Alex Beam explains in his Boston Globe column,…
As The Guardian’s Patrick Barkham puts it, Michael Crichton is “most famous for his far-fetched tale of how dinosaurs could be brought to life with DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber.” But now, the author of Jurassic Park “has written a thriller about ecoterrorism which…
“For the second year running a work of non-fiction has won the Guardian First Book award,” as Michelle Pauli reports in a story from The Guardian itself. The winner of the £10,000 prize was Armand Marie Leroi for the book Mutants: On the Form, Varieties…
