The SAT predicts success remarkably well given that it takes just a few hours to administer. Photo by Shutterstock The College Board—the standardized testing behemoth that develops and administers the SAT and other tests—has redesigned its flagship product again. Beginning in spring 2016, the…

S tone steps descended into the ground, and I walked down them slowly as if I were entering a dark movie theater, careful not to stumble and disrupt the silence. Once my eyes adjusted to the faint light at the foot of the stairs, I saw that I was standing in the open chamber of a cave. Where the…

Illustration by Nathaniel Gold A battle is being waged over kin and kind: Did cooperation evolve in humans and other animals because it helped relatives? Or because it promoted group living? A school of thought known as inclusive fitness theory—or kin selection—sits at the center of the conflict.…

T he lights in the sky above us—the sun, the moon, and the panoply of countless stars—have surely been a source of wonder since long before recorded history. Ingenious efforts to measure distances to them began in earnest in the 3rd and 4th centuries B.C., and astronomers and astrophysicists today,…

A few key data points about Amelia Sloan: She likes to suck her own toes. She wears pink tutus. She doesn’t do interviews with journalists. She was born in…

Mary-Kay Wilmers at the offices of the London Review of Books in Bloomsbury, London. Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer T he offices of the London Review of Books are situated on the top two floors of a Georgian townhouse in the shadow of the British Museum. To reach them, you either brave…

Adam and Peter Lanza on a hike when Adam was about ten. As a child, Peter says, Adam was “just a normal little weird kid.” Credit Background photograph from AP / Western Connecticut State University; family photograph courtesy Peter Lanza In Peter Lanza’s new house, on a secluded private road in…

The King of Crete demanded that, to atone for the death of his son, the city of Athens send him seven young men and seven young women every seventh year. When they arrived in Crete, they were sent into the Labyrinth, at the centre of which lived the Minotaur, a monstrous creature with the body of a…

Ghosting Andrew O’Hagan On 5 January 2011, at 8.30 p.m., I was messing about at home when the phone buzzed on the sofa. It was a text from Jamie Byng, the publisher of Canongate. ‘Are you about?’ it said. ‘I have a somewhat left-field idea. It’s potentially very exciting. But I need to discuss…

Don't insult Watson's artificial intelligence. Photo by Ben Hider/Getty Images Artificial intelligence is here now. This doesn’t mean that Cylons disguised as humans have infiltrated our societies, or that the processors behind one of the search engines have become sentient and are now making their…

jan 30, 2014 – Save Artist Jeff Thompson received a Rhizome commission in 2012 for his project Computers on Law & Order , for which he watched every episode of the long-running television series and took screenshots of all the computers. Thompson will present an illustrated lecture based on the…

(Photo: Pacific Standard) I was 12 hours into a summer vacation in Palm Springs when my phone hummed to life, buzzing twice next to me in the dark of my hotel room. I squinted at the screen. It was 5:30 a.m., and a friend was texting me from the opposite coast. “Amanda, this twitter account.…

Whenever I visit scientists to discuss their research, there comes a moment when they say, with barely concealed pride: ‘Do you want a tour of the lab?’ It is invariably slightly touching — like Willy Wonka dying to show off his chocolate factory. I’m glad to accept, knowing what lies in store:…

Left to right: A snapshot of the author's graffiti; a "selfie" of the author, dressed in his suit and tie and ready to vandalize; a surveillance video still of the work in progress (Bobby Constantino) Ten years ago, when I started my career as an assistant district attorney in the Roxbury…

The United States Food and Drug Administration is not known for its prose. So the warning letter that it sent to 23andMe, the direct-to-consumer genetic-testing company, on November 22nd, was a surprise in more ways than one. “It reads like the letter of a jilted lover,” Misha Angrist, a former…

--> “ Whereof one cannotspeak, thereof one must be silent ” - Wittgenstein That’s a maxim to live by, or certainly toblog by, but I am about to break it. Most of the time I try to write aboutthings I feel I have some understanding of (rightly or wrongly) or at least aninformed opinion on. But I am…

1. It is harder than you might think to destroy an Apple MacBook Pro according to British government standards. In a perfect world the officials who want to destroy such machines prefer them to be dropped into a kind of giant food mixer that reduces them to dust. Lacking such equipment, The Guardian…

Back in my baboon-watching days in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, all eyes — at least, mine and the savannah baboons’ — were on monkey matrilines. These tight networks of monkey mothers, grandmothers, daughters, aunts, and nieces formed the core of my study groups. The young males transferred out of…

Every September teachers up and down the land welcome new classes of children. Each child they see in front of them is visibly unique and will present them with different challenges as the year progresses. Some will learn easily and well while others will find learning new skills difficult and need…

In 2013, Lance Armstrong confessed that he had cheated to win the Tour de France. The moment marked the breathtaking fall of an athlete who had transformed himself from a brash and undisciplined teenage triathlete to a global sporting icon. In their forthcoming book, "Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the…

F ew are chosen. Fewer succeed. Journey now to an island world surrealistically tinged with mystery … where every vibrant rock, scrap of paper, and sound may hold vital clues to your unraveling a chilling tale of intrigue and injustice that defies all boundaries of time and space. Only your wits and…

When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and…

B y the time Bruce Cuthbert, director of adult translational research at the National Institute of Mental Health, paced to the podium at the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science this May, the audience could be forgiven for thinking he wanted to rewrite the book on mental…

“I don’t care about any effect that I need more than 20 subjects per cell to detect.” I have heard statements to this effect a number of times over the years. Sometimes from the mouths of some pretty well-established researchers, and sometimes from people quoting the well-established researchers…

PROGRAMMING ART AUDIO DESIGN PRODUCTION BIZ/MARKETING Latest Jobs View All RSS April 30, 2016 Sucker Punch Productions Systems Designer Demiurge Studios (SEGA) Engineering Director Sony PlayStation Senior Animation Programmer Meridian Technologies OpenCV Developer Sony PlayStation Senior Staff…

Review of Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm than Good , by James Davies, and Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry , by Tom Burns. Our understanding of the brain is primitive at best, and our treatments for mental illnesses are appalling. They are not very effective,…

I recently saw an article by an astute reporter that described one of our colleagues as a researcher who “…has made a career out of finding data….” Finding data. What a lush expression. In this case, as it seems always to be the case, the researcher had a knack for finding data that supported his or…

By George Graham and Owen Flanagan Even before the much-heralded DSM-5 was released, Thomas Insel the Director of NIMH criticized it for lacking “scientific validity.” In his blog post entitled “Transforming Diagnosis,” Insel admitted that the symptom-based approach of DSM is as good as we can get…

I met my first semipalmated sandpiper in a crook of Jamaica Bay, an overlooked shore strewn with broken bottles and religious offerings at the edge of New York City. I didn’t know what it was called, this small, dun-and-white bird running the flats like a wind-up toy, stopping to peck mud and racing…

How pleasant it is to live in the 21st century, enlightened, no longer scared of science. We can marvel at the diversity of life with David Attenborough; face the vastness of the cosmos with Brian Cox. These days we talk of colliders and particles as casually as we shop for milk. Science is our…

Lost in the Forest Ian Hacking Buy DSM-5: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition by the American Psychiatric Association American Psychiatric Publishing, 947 pp, £97.00, May 2013, ISBN 978 0 89042 555 8 The new edition of the DSM replaces DSM-IV, which appeared in 1994.…

A problem of technique Most of the problems so far weren't really experimental ones; rather, they were problems with interpretation. It's only when the team went after sequences from the genome that things got a bit strange. A few of their samples appeared to have sufficient DNA to send them for…

Lauren Kaelin/Benjameme.net Messing With Texas The Texas GOP very nearly stole a vote with 180,000 people watching. The Internet stopped it. Here’s what you didn’t see on TV. It’s 4:39 a.m. and Christopher Dido’s UStream channel has only just gone dark. I don’t know him, but the Austin-based citizen…