MachineMachine /stream

Link

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same…

Link

Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that the human brain dynamically changes in response to experience and to changes in the environment, a phenomenon that is known as “plasticity.” It is also…

Link

Boston University neuroscientist Patrick McNamara has an interesting evolutionary theory of dreaming. McNamara’s theory draws from the well-known “handicapping principle” in evolutionary biology, where some organisms have been observed to…

Link

Empathy involves, in part, the ability to simulate the internal states of others. The authors hypothesized that our ability to manipulate, rotate and simulate mental representations of the physical world,…

Link

Human beings expend an enormous amount of energy doing things that don't seem to have any survival value: singing, dancing, painting caves, decorating spears and, above all, telling stories. (Think…

Link

This is a remarkably uninformed article about what effect a huge nuclear war would have upon the human race. The author seems to think that the radiation would create a…

Link

Six experts discuss the merits of framing climate change, the language that troubles them, and the inherent bias of any chosen word. In a report to be released the first…

Link

How did life arise from inorganic matter? Our progress on this question has been impeded by a formidable cognitive barrier. Because we perceive a deep gap when we think about…

Link

Deep in the deluge of knowledge that poured forth from science in the 20th century were found ironclad limits on what we can know. Werner Heisenberg discovered that improved precision…

Link

A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights,…