Daniel Rourke /stream

Wikipedia Oklo Oklo is a region near the town of Franceville, in the Haut-Ogooué province of the Central African state of Gabon. The discovery in September 1972 of several natural nuclear fission reactors in the uranium mines situated there has fired the imagination and aroused…

September 28 2009, 9:07am | Comments
Bookmark Thinking literally
Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the…

September 28 2009, 8:59am | Comments
Ask Metafilter Offsetting sea level rise: An engineering idea of Biblical proportions | Ask Metafilter The seas are rising. Climate change has made it inevitable. I have a strange question... Assuming that world sea-level rises by 1 metre over the next hundred years - Would it be possible to cordon off a section of land, somewhere in the…

September 18 2009, 8:12am | Comments
Bookmark Beyond space and time: To the Nth Dimension
We don't have any trouble coping with three dimensions – or four at a pinch. The 3D world of solid objects and limitless space is something we accept with scarcely a…

September 18 2009, 1:01am | Comments
Bookmark Must science declare a holy war on religion?
This fall, evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins -- most recently famous for his public exhortation to atheism, "The God Delusion" -- returns to writing about science. Dawkins' new book,…

September 17 2009, 2:32am | Comments
Bookmark If zombies actually existed
If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively. That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out…

August 22 2009, 7:03am | Comments
Bookmark How to fake science, history and religion
One of the epigraphs that punctuate Invented Knowledge is from Pascal: "It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true…

August 6 2009, 1:20pm | Comments
Bookmark The Higher Arithmetic - How to count to a Zillion
Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt reached…

August 5 2009, 3:32am | Comments
Bookmark Is Star Trek A Religion?
Star Trek has long been described as a cult phenomenon…but is it an actual cult? Some anthropologists think so. Following the example of anthropologist Margaret Mead, they lived among the natives…

July 30 2009, 1:22pm | Comments
YouTube

July 27 2009, 5:37pm | Comments
Bookmark Amber Ale: Brewing Beer from 45-Million-Year-Old Yeast
The dish contains a variant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, known in culinary circles as baker's or brewer's yeast. But Cano didn't get this from Whole Foods. Back in 1995, he extracted it…

July 20 2009, 7:01pm | Comments
YouTube

July 12 2009, 3:54pm | Comments
Bookmark Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio's Hypermodern Cultural Theory
Paul Virilio is one of the most significant French cultural theorists writing today.1 Increasingly hailed as the inventor of concepts such as 'dromology' (the 'science' of speed), Virilio is renowned for…

July 7 2009, 9:34am | Comments
Bookmark Ant mega-colony takes over world
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 inter-related…

July 2 2009, 9:10am | Comments
Bookmark Take two video games and call me in the morning
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 believed…

July 1 2009, 9:22am | Comments
Bookmark The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content
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 display…

June 27 2009, 4:32am | Comments
Bookmark What Skepticism Reveals about Science
“The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies, and in the end isn’t that the real truth? The…

June 24 2009, 3:26pm | Comments
Bookmark Exploring Empathic Space: Correlates of Perspective Transformation Ability and Biases in Spatial…
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, including…

June 23 2009, 2:42pm | Comments
Bookmark Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism
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 how…

June 8 2009, 12:41am | Comments
Bookmark How Nuclear Radiation Can Change Our Race
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 race…

June 6 2009, 9:36am | Comments
Bookmark Human Language Gene Changes the Sound of Mouse Squeaks
People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching chimpanzees…

May 29 2009, 6:51am | Comments
Bookmark Is There a Better Word for Doom?
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 week…

May 27 2009, 5:19pm | Comments
Bookmark The Origin of Life
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 the…

May 23 2009, 4:48am | Comments
Writing from 3quarksdaily The Next Great Discontinuity: The Data Deluge

May 5 2009, 7:35am | Comments
YouTube

March 23 2009, 1:42am | Comments
Bookmark Within Any Possible Universe, No Intellect Can Ever Know It All |…
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 regarding,…

March 17 2009, 9:35am | Comments
Bookmark Readers build vivid mental simulations of narrative situations
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, tastes…

January 29 2009, 6:04am | Comments
Writing for 3quarksdaily In Another city another me is writing
Take this article, for example. It is an unwinding spring of phonic sounds, encoded into a series of arbitrary symbols, stretching from left to right within an imaginary frame projected onto the surface of your computer screen. Here lies the perfect example of an…

December 29 2008, 10:52am | Comments
Writing for Spacecollective How Things Become: The Infinity of Definition
The perceiver's position in an architectural, or merely physical space, determines the dimensional imperatives of that person's mental qualia. It is interesting to note that each viewer of a rainbow stands at the centre of their very own optical illusion; that light, once split…

December 29 2008, 10:47am | Comments
Spacecollective.org The Metaphor is the Message Part II: Palimpsests Palimpsests Palimpsests

April 24 2008, 8:57am | Comments
Metafilter The Simulacrisation of Technology into Life As the Pentagon ousts plans to turn insects into cyber war machines you'd be forgiven for asking the question: Where does the real digital end and the faked life begin? Are we simulating life synthetically? or just speeding up an entirely natural process?…

March 15 2006, 8:09pm | Comments
Metafilter Clonycavan Styling Gel - 2000 years of cool or your money back! Body, volume, style and shine with long-lasting power. Clonycavan Styling Gel, along with mummification in Irish peat, works together with your freshly disemboweled corpse to protect hair from the disruptive power of 2000 years of rigor-mortis.

January 17 2006, 9:06pm | Comments

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