It’s about swift action — and tapping into emotion — March 2020 was a roller-coaster month for Giota Lourida, MD, PhD, an infectious diseases senior consultant at Sotiria Chest Diseases Hospital of Athens, Greece. Lourida, who treated the first two first cases of coronavirus in Athens, says that when Sotiria became one of the three Athens hospitals dedicated to treating…

Scientists are actively installing monitors along Kolumbo’s seafloor — On a recent November morning, Giannis Bellonias was sipping tsipouro on the veranda of his cave house in Santorini, Greece. “Visibility is poor today. Hope Kolumbo won’t give scientists a hard time,” Bellonias said to his wife, looking out onto the Aegean sea. …

They are popping up everywhere and in rich varieties: hot yoga, power yoga, hatha yoga, kundalini yoga, mindfulness. Practices from within the gut of the East are gaining the trust of Westerners who may be Christians, Pentecostals, skeptics, atheists, or hipsters. Just the other day, a particularly stressed friend told…

Science is dragging psychedelics out of stigma, suggesting they have a remarkable host of abilities in fighting addictions, depression — or tapping into the mystic. In July 2015, 25-year-old programmer Mickael Bergeron Neron landed in the jungle bordering the city of Iquitos, the largest metropolis in the Peruvian Amazon. He…

Are our brains hardwired for God? The next frontier for neuroscience exploration is to answer whether we are all equally programmed to believe…or not. — In 2001, acclaimed ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins put on the “God helmet,” electrode-laden headgear designed to introduce the wearer to a “supreme power” by disrupting the normal goings-on of the brain with electric currents. Dawkins would report that his breathing rhythm and limb sensations were somehow affected, but…

Lost in the awe at the beauty around me, I must have slipped into a state of heightened awareness…It seemed to me, as I struggled afterward to recall the experience, that self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to merge, to become…