There are plenty of superpowers that would make a nice addition to my current lifestyle. I would be delighted to wake up one morning with the ability to fly, to become invisible, or even to turn matter into gold, provided my Midas touch came with a reliable on-off switch. But the superpower that I…

Movie makers have been sending humans into deep space for decades, and a typical way of explaining how they got there unscathed is by placing them in stasis. Event Horizon , Prometheus , and the Alien series of movies are good examples of this. Humans in capsules in a suspended biological state…

T he Northwestern University economist Charles Manksi calls it the “reflection problem”: How can we know if person A is affecting person B, or the reverse? Without being in each person’s head or observing every subtle non-verbal cue in their interactions, it’s impossible to know what’s causing what,…

For long-distance swimmers like Diana Nyad, the greatest barrier is mental endurance. Credit Photograph by Catherine Opie / Regen Projects The first time Diana Nyad tried to swim around Manhattan, in the fall of 1975, she was pulled out of the East River in the black of night after eight hours of…

“Can you point to Center City?” neuroscientist Russell Epstein likes to ask visitors to his office at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Sometimes they can do it. Sometimes they have a little trouble. And sometimes, Epstein says, “they have no idea how they’d even begin to solve that…

Stuck at your desk? Need a soundtrack to mellow out on a Monday? I have just what you need! This hour-long recording of a dawn chorus in the mountains of Costa Rica is lovely to listen to, especially as winter edges closer here in the Northern Hemisphere. You might also like an interlude in a very…

Acanthoplus discoidalis goes by many names: armoured bush cricket, armoured ground cricket, armoured katydid, corn cricket, setotojane, and koringkrieke. It's an insect native to the African bush across Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Because they make good a snack for many different…

Getty In a recent exposé, The New York Times revealed the appalling conditions that surround end-of-life care in New York City and the perverse incentives that perpetuate the system. The piece —tragic, enraging, and, one hopes, change-inducing—exemplifies the real, meaningful value that the best…

The New Health Care For a drug to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it must prove itself better than a placebo, or fake drug. This is because of the “placebo effect,” in which patients often improve just because they think they are being treated with something. If we can’t compare a…

Michael Friberg John Kane was on a hell of a winning streak. On July 3, 2009, he walked alone into the high-limit room at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas and sat down at a video poker machine called the Game King. Six minutes later the purple light on the top of the machine flashed, signaling a…

Waste collectors like Sayyid Ahmed, known as zabaleen, work in an informal economy, but they provide a remarkably efficient recycling service and become experts on their neighborhoods. Credit Photograph by Rena Effendi / Institute In Cairo, my family lives on the ground floor of an old building, in…

Photo Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general, has been accused of going easy on Wall Street. Credit Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Related Links Understanding Libor Documents: Libor Settlements With Regulators The Justice Department is preparing a fresh round of attacks on…

Some people can’t go to sleep until late; others can’t sleep in. Both suffer “social jet lag.” Credit Illustration by Nishant Choksi Nathaniel Kleitman, known as the “father of modern sleep research,” was born in 1895 in Bessarabia—now Moldova—and spent much of his youth on the run. First, pogroms…

Photograph by Nick Hannes/Hollandse Hoogte/Redux Robin Dunbar came up with his eponymous number almost by accident. The University of Oxford anthropologist and psychologist (then at University College London) was trying to solve the problem of why primates devote so much time and effort to grooming.…

Online ads, exclusive online communities, and the potential for adverse impacts from big data analytics Online advertising today is a big data analytic marvel, deciding in the time it takes to load a web page which ad, among billions, to deliver to which of billions of domains. Large and fast for…

Image via Wikicommons As long as there are governments that don't want young people to go around indiscriminately hoovering up drugs, there will be chemists tirelessly working to create new ones that haven't been declared illegal yet. Research chemicals, or RCs , are often sold as legal highs. They…

Steve Fisch John Huguenard and his colleagues found that specific areas of the mammalian brain can secrete a protein that can act as an anti-epileptic compound. Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found that a naturally occurring protein secreted only in discrete areas of…