Short Schrift

Svante Pääbo, " Mapping the Neanderthal Genome ": One thing that we're beginning to see is that we are extremely closely relat...

Jonah Lehrer on "Emotional Perception" : From its inception in the mid-1950's, the cognitive revolution was guided by a single...

Historiscientific nerd alert: There's a hot new method of dating historical artifacts, specifically ceramic artifacts, based on their m...

Andrew Hungerford -- aka the smartest, funniest dramatist * astrophysicist = lighting director you should know -- has written the best post ...

Biologists are debating how much quantitative analysis their field needs ; at Language Log, Mark Liberman pivots to linguistics : The role o...

We loooove Kevin Kelly around here at Snarkmarket. Robin tipped me off to his stuff and he's since joined Atul Gawande, Roger Ebert, Vir...

If I ever meet Atul Gawande, I'm giving him a high-five, a hug, and then I'm going to try to talk to him for about fifteen minutes a...

Andrew Hungerford -- aka the smartest, funniest dramatist * astrophysicist = lighting director you should know -- has written the best post ...

This is a post about the new Star Trek movie that contains no spoilers . However: Here's my rule about movie and television spoilers. I...

Charlie Jane Anders, " Why Dollhouse Really Is Joss Whedon's Greatest Work ": The evil in Dollhouse is harder to deal with tha...

A good anecdotal lead. Carolina Solis is a medical student who did research on parasitic infections caused by contaminated well water in rur...

Jonah Lehrer + Allison Gopnik on baby brains : The hyperabundance of thoughts in the baby brain also reflects profound differences in the wa...

Good-looking people enjoy what economists/sociologists call a " beauty premium ." They get paid more and are seen as better at the...

The other day, a group of my friends, including two other PhDs, discussed the high rate of depression among graduate students. "It'...

Kevin Kelly on technology and group identity : Technologies have a social dimension beyond their mere mechanical performance.  We adopt new ...

Whoa -- retired Marine officer Dave Dilegge and military blogger Andrew Exum (spurred by Thomas Ricks's new book The Gamble ) look at t...

Maybe I'm just feeling like a reductive ol' pragmatist lately, but I feel like these two very problems both have the same answer. D...

Paul Krugman writes about how FDR's caution in doling out economic stimulus in the mid-30s nearly undid the whole recovery from the Gre...

Jonah Lehrer on the failure of financial markets and the Grand Banks fisheries : In the 1970's, the government instituted strict regula...

I . Love . Buckypaper .