The Olympics are obviously a contradictory event, says David Brooks. An opening ceremony which celebrates virtues of unity and equality are shortly followed by fierce competition.

Elle Zober’s husband left her for a 22-year old “yoga girl,” and Elle didn’t take it with a whimper. Instead she channeled her heartache and disappointment into crafting what has […]

The often-overlooked function of our justice system is its putative role. So how far are people willing to go to punish criminals? How many of your own resources would you sacrifice to punish a thief? 

When a German court in Cologne ruled last month that baby boys could not be circumcised for religious reasons, Jewish and Muslim groups erupted in protest while a chorus of […]

If “LA MoCA” sounds to you like something you’d order from Starbucks, then you probably don’t know anything about the recent kerfuffle surrounding what is being called the murder of […]

      Derecho Alert!!!!!! AAAIIIGGGHHH!!!! Grab the kids! Run for the basement, quick!       As this is being written a line of severe thunderstorms is sweeping across sections of the Northeast […]

On Tuesday, Monsignor William Lynn, former secretary of clergy for the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, was sentenced to three to six years in prison for his role in shielding pedophile […]

What's the Big Idea? Lionel Richie is a meme phenomenon. His music video “Hello” has inspired countless people to share both image and video pastiches of him all over the internet. […]

Alison Klayman signed up for the job and that chance meeting flourished into a friendship with Ai Weiwei, China's most famous avant garde artist turned political activist, during some of the most tumultuous years of his career.  

Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains how tiny variations in genetics impact the way we perceive reality. In the rarest of cases, they can actually cause us to see sound, taste color, […]

On a late winter day in 1922, the sound of a gun shot resounded with a loud boom in the hills surrounding the house of three-year-old Edgar Curtis. The sound itself wasn't out of the ordinary, since the Curtises lived near a firing range. What was extraordinary was the question the boy turned to ask his mother: "What is that big, black noise?"   

Physicists at the UK's National Physics Laboratory have created a device which could be scaled to store numerous ion-based quantum bits, paving the way for a quantum computer microchip. 

As a predictor of technological change, the little known Wright's Law outperforms Moore's Law, which famously (and mostly correctly) states that computer power doubles every 18 months.

Why I Support Guns I submit that there is a rational, human, apolitical argument for supporting gun ownership in America. No prominent supporter of gun use and ownership, nor the […]

A team of MIT and Harvard physicists have successfully turned a laser into a single beam of photons. The advance is essential to creating tomorrow's quantum computers. 

The documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is the portrait of a man fighting a one-man war of ideas with the Chinese government, daily putting his own life at risk for the sake of the country he loves.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about QR codes and how they could be used in textbooks over at edcetera. Now, IKEA came out with a pretty […]

Scaremail fights government surveillance with the power of nonsense.

I was thinking of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who is now trying for a political comeback, while driving home from New Haven, listening to a blues hour out of a […]

This year's winner of the Google Science Fair is 17 year-old Brittany Wenger, who has coded a cloud-based computer program to think like the human brain and locate malignant tumors.