Ticks, Mites and Mysterious Lone Star Illnesses
Ticks are, in the words of Pliny the Elder, 'the foulest and nastiest creature that be.' If these blood sucking arachnids and their mite brethren weren’t horrible enough, they’re second only to the mo...
29 Juni 20171h 9min
CRISPR and the Genetic Astronaut
In 1960, scientists Nathan Kline and Manfred Clynes envisioned a spacefaring cyborg, technologically augmented to endure the rigors of space travel. The subsequent six decades of space exploration lar...
27 Juni 20171h 7min
Extended Cognition: Brain, Fingers, Web and Krang
It’s easy to think yourself a mere brain within a human body -- a cognitive machine making sense out of all the incoming sense data from outside world. But what if other parts of the body and even obj...
22 Juni 20171h 10min
Name Thy Demons: The Roots of Human Violence
Is human civilization growing less violent? Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker argued the point in his 2011 book 'The Better Angels of Our Nature,' in which he also defined the 'five inner demons' that...
20 Juni 20171h 20min
AI, Machine Learning and Human Creativity
Just as manufacturing automation cuts into human jobs, the prospect of creative artificial intelligence raises the specter of robot writers, robot artists and robot musicians who never sleep and alway...
15 Juni 20171h 17min
Science Communication Breakdown
Science enabled humans to ascend out of the darkness and tackle life’s problems with systematic, self-correcting rigidity. Yet, when faced with scientific consensus on climate change and other issues,...
14 Juni 201754min
There But For Science: Blood Navigation
Imagine a world in which sailing ships navigate by the yelps of tormented dogs and nuclear submarines whisper to each other via the screams of rabbits and their murdered young? In both of these cases,...
9 Juni 20171h 16min
The Tower of Babel
An ancient people build a tower to touch the heavens. A vengeful god disrupts the project through the splintering of human language. Everyone’s left to pick up the pieces. The Tower of Babel myth reso...
6 Juni 20171h 22min
