“Brain-manipulation studies may produce spurious links to behaviour”

“In work with rats and zebra finches, neuroscientist Bence Ölveczky of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his team found that stimulating one part of the brain to induce certain behaviours might…

“Climate Change Conversations Are Targeted in Questionnaire to Energy Department”

“former Energy Department employees and presidential transition officials said that while it is normal for presidential transition teams to ask policy questions, it is highly unusual to send…

“NASA’s Bug Repellent Aims to Save Airlines Millions in Fuel Cost”

“as pressure grows to make airliners more fuel efficient and lessen their impact on the environment, eliminating insect contamination is an area that holds a potentially huge payoff for future designs. Aircraft emit…

“Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring incentives and practices to promote truth over publishability”

“The persistence of false findings can be meliorated with strategies that make the fundamental but abstract accuracy motive — getting it right — competitive…

“The people who drink human blood”

“Before he had met any vampires, Browning suspected they had just blurred the line between fact and fiction. “I’d assumed that these people were bonkers and had just read too many Anne Rice novels.”

By the time he had offered himself as a…

“Neuroscience: Tortured reasoning”

“The remarks of one official at a HIG-organized conference on torture in Washington DC can be summed up as: how could a new agency, created to both conduct and study torture, replace the decades of practice and perfection attained by the CIA? By adding a scientific…

“The Loss”

“Fact No 2: Of persons with peripheral arterial disease (PAD) who have a lower-extremity amputation, up to 55 percent require amputation of the second leg within two or three years.

Fact No. 3: In the US, black Americans are up to four times as likely as other racial groups to lose…