“The Mixed-Up Brothers of Bogotá”

“Jorge moved to his desktop computer so he could see the images more closely. He clicked once more on the photo of William and the friend holding shot glasses. Now that the image was large, he could examine what he had failed, incredibly, to notice when he looked at the…

“The brains of men and women aren’t really that different, study finds”

“all of our brains seem to share a patchwork of forms; some that are more common in males, others that are more common in females, and some that are common to both. The findings could change how scientists…

“Journal impact factors ‘no longer credible’”

“One of the most widely used impact factors is calculated by Thomson Reuters by dividing the average number of citations given to articles in a journal by the total number of papers. Normally the figure is calculated for articles published over the…

“Star Lords: ‘Star Wars’ and the monomyth of Silicon Valley”

“The correspondence between Campbell’s “monomyth” and the plot details of the original Star Wars trilogy are now well known: “A hero [Luke Skywalker] ventures forth from the world of common day [humdrum desert planet…

“Who would buy a car programmed to sacrifice the owner?”

“One of the underlying assumptions in the discussing the ethics of the self-driving car is that there is a knowable outcome and, working backwards, a right answer…

Equally at fault for the failure of making…

“What It’s Like as a ‘Girl’ in the Lab”

“Twenty-first-century science has a great deal in common with the medieval apprentice system. Young scientists, typically graduate students and postdoctoral fellows like me, join the laboratory of an established principal investigator, who is rarely involved…

“First DNA extracted from an ancient African skeleton shows widespread mixing with Eurasians”

“A paper published online this week in Science reveals the first prehistoric genome from Africa: that of Mota, a hunter-gatherer man who lived 4500 years ago in the…

“Famous First Landing Pages (Updated)”

“If your startup is successful, no one will remember how ugly your product looked the day you launched. (And if it’s not successful, no one will care.)

When we think about successful companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, we tend…

“Turning Back the Clock on Human Evolution”

“Alemseged was headed to the most dangerous spot within the Afar, which even Indiana Jones-types avoided because of constant conflicts between local tribes. The armed soldiers were his security. Alemseged had no salaried scientific position, and refused…

“Picture This? Some Just Can’t”

“The scientists showed names to MX and asked him to picture their faces. In normal brains, some of those face-recognition regions again become active. In MX’s brain, none of them did.

Paradoxically, though, MX could answer questions that would seem…