Denyse O'Leary
Why Do Science and Tech Writers Hate Elon Musk?
It's partly because he encourages bottom-up media but also he encourages a sort of vision that is now largely lost
Woke SciAm Editor Resigns in Post-US Election Uproar
Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine and former Scientific American columnist, offers a thoughtful response
Remember when chatbots would write poetry better than Shakespeare?
Post-COVID, trust in science said to be on the rise
At Nature: What Is So Special About the Human Brain?
None of the features identified by neuroscientists explain why humans think about things that other animal life forms don'tWhy science is not good evidence for atheism
Fr. Patrick Gorevan (St. Patrick’s Maynooth) offers some thoughts on God and science at Australia’s MercatorNet. He is discussing a recent book, Science at the Doorstep to God (Ignatius 2023) by Fr. Robert Spitzer: How about the extraordinary and unlikely fine-tuning which was needed for life to emerge? Sir Fred Hoyle, an adamant atheist, after discovering the need for exceedingly Read More ›
Possible Breakthrough: Bee Gene Specifies Complex Hive Behavior
The researchers used CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors to modify or switch off the dsx gene in selected bees
Do We Need Language To Think? Some Researchers Say No
At one time, it was strictly a philosophical issue but then neuroscientists got involvedA controversy about whether we need language to think pits two MIT scholars against each other: Noam Chomsky (yes) vs. Evelina Fedorenko (no). For a long time, it was only a philosophical issue: Plato saw thinking as a conversation with oneself. If you don’t form concepts into words are you really thinking? Chomsky agreed. But later, neuroscientists like Fedorenko got involved, offering some research findings. Last summer at the New York Times, science writer Carl Zimmer reported, When Dr. Fedorenko began this work in 2009, studies had found that the same brain regions required for language were also active when people reasoned or carried out arithmetic. But Dr. Fedorenko and other researchers discovered that this overlap was a mirage. Part Read More ›
Study: Near-death experience — not mere danger — transforms lives
Researchers: Cats can eavesdrop on human conversations — sort of
The real losers in yesterday’s U.S. election were the media
Neuroscientist Seeks the First Spark of Human Consciousness
It's a challenge. Human consciousness is very hard to define for the purposes of this kind of research
Can Brain Structure Alone Explain Why We Have Language?
How human languages came to exist is an unsolved mystery within science
Burials from 120,000 years ago: Was it Neanderthals vs. others?
Did Stephen Hawking End His Career by Giving Up on Truth?
A philosopher argues the case. But has the rejection of truth in physics spread widely into popular culture?Seasonal AI-generated freakout: Halloween Egg! Attack
Free Will: A Materialist Thinks It Might Somehow Be Real
Psychiatrist Ralph Lewis thinks that Darwinian evolution can explain human consciousness but now hesitates to debunk free willEarlier this year, University of Toronto psychiatrist Ralph Lewis wrote a two-part series at Psychology Today titled “The Strongest Neuroscience Arguments in the Free Will Debate” (here and here). He looked at Mitchell (yes) and Sapolsky (no), both of whom published serious books on the topic in 2023. And he concluded, For now, for practical purposes, given our current level of incomplete understanding of the complexities of the brain’s decision-making processes, and our inability to predict human behaviors in most situations, we might as well regard ourselves as having free will—or rather, degrees of freedom. We do know that our brain has highly evolved systems for self-control—even for those of us who struggle with this relatively more than others, and Read More ›
Washington Post owner defends his refusal to endorse Harris
