Category: ideas

Sure, Amundsen made it to both poles – but almost everyone knows the stories of the doomed Captain Robert Scott. That’s because Scott was noble in defeat – and humans like that kind of story, says Harry Mount.

“We can now ask how does observed lighting behave in response to things such as population and economic growth, external investments, war, and economic collapse.”

“A Web-based video game called Phylo allows game players to arrange sequences of colored blocks that represent nucleotides of human DNA. The game asks the players to recognize patterns and match them up in closely related species, comparing their results to a computer and scoring them.”

“What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one – not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians – seem to have minded, or even noticed.”

“Handedness, as the dominance of one hand over the other is called, provides a window into the way our brains are wired, experts say. And it may help shed light on disorders related to brain development, like dyslexia, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, which are more common in left-handed people.”

“If we were able to record your brain while you watch a silent movie, we would see your auditory cortex activate, even though there’s not a single sound that impacts your eardrum. There’s a creative process involved. The brain is filling in auditory information by drawing on memories.”

“From WikiLeaks to phone hacking, the tension between openness, privacy and confidentiality has become one of the defining issues of our time. Scientists have unexpectedly found themselves at the heart of this debate, as the latest round of leaked climate emails makes abundantly clear.”

“The researchers speculate that musicians learn to think in terms of spatial relationships “because notes are coded in terms of their spatial positions.” This makes intuitive sense. A musician, like an athlete, instinctively learns to navigate through space: one reads notes on a staff, while another masters the parameters of a tennis court or football field.”

A libertarian legal scholar suggests a “thought experiment in which the concept of law – i.e. rights enforcement – is determined by the marketplace, and not the political process.”