Author: Admin

As countries and private companies race to return to the moon, the need to protect the lunar far side—the hemisphere of Earth’s companion that always faces away from our planet—continues to grow. For decades, scientists have argued that the far side’s unique combination of accessibility and isolation makes it vital real estate for a plethora […]

In the weeks to come, we’re about to relearn that old truth: necessity is the mother of invention. Researchers will work around-the-clock because of the world’s need for a cure for COVID-19. But it’s worth keeping a corollary thought in all of our minds: necessity may be the mother of invention, but curiosity and imagination […]

Scientific American April 2020 The naive answer is that white men and scientists are coldly rational—but that’s not the whole story Scientists often complain that people are irrational in their opposition to technologies such as nuclear power and genetically modified (GM) crops. From a statistical perspective, these are very safe, and so (it is argued) […]

In 1985, when I was a baby journalist writing my first college newspaper story, I covered a symposium at Harvard inaugurating the Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay (META), a computer system designed by physicist Paul Horowitz to sift through millions of narrow radio channels for signals from other civilizations. Carl Sagan was on hand that weekend to […]

When parents ask, “What grade did you get?” there is a common follow-up question: “So who got the highest grade?” The practice of making such social comparisons is popular in all corners of the world, research shows. Many educators select and publicly announce the “best student” in a class or school. Adults praise children for […]