How to measure the immeasurable — and why it can sometimes go wrong. Different  people have different swearing habits. Some people spew out expletives  at the drop of a hat, while others fee...

Leave me alone with my phone

A history of the universe in verse

Is it really all just mumbo-jumbo woo-woo talk?

Our incomplete education could end the world. Can the humanities save us from ourselves?

How do we prevent robots from turning on their human masters?

The ancient rules that lie behind divinity, democracy, and Daraprim

How come our Universe was fine-tuned to enable the miracle of Life? Consider Omega. Commonly known as the density parameter, it tells us how important gravity is in the expanding universe. ...

Master or slave?

Do users have a ‘body’ that exists independently from the online profile? Is there life after deletion? That’s a question that has never been answered. Or rather, it’s been answered many di...

Don’t wait for creativity to come to you — create it yourself Let’s  travel back in time. Travel way, way back. Back to when our ancestors  roamed the wilderness with nothing more than anima...

The hidden details that influence your decisions — and the Aztec way to deal with them Suddenly, the subsidies stopped coming. They just didn’t arrive. Then, people found the money going to ...

What lessons can today’s world learn from an ancient Mongol debate? I was watching a Fox News video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XptovfGo1Xo] the other day, about the Green New Deal. O...

A super-smart AI may not be evil. But what it could be, is even more dangerous. This  year, SpaceX made it possible to reuse rockets, by making them land on  earth instead of burning up in t...

Who owns the Mound? The answer is not so clear. The Mound rises up like a tiny mountain on the grass. Tiny compared to mountains, that is: on the scale of those who live in it, the Mound can...

Thinner than thread and stronger than steel, silk is not simply for snares. She’s full of brains. Very full. That’s practically all she is — a brain with its support system, carried on eight...

How banks make money by borrowing it from the future Tall ships and tall kings Three times three What brought they from the foundered land Over the flowing sea? Seven stars and seven stones ...