Seed Media Group

July 27, 2007

Vacation

Category:

A note to my readers: I'll be on vacation for the next week, so please pardon the sporadic posting. Thanks, Jonah...

Read on »

July 24, 2007

The Honesty of Autism

Category: Culture

Simon Baron-Cohen, of mindblindness fame, uses autism to examine the psychology of dishonesty. He concludes that the central reason people with autism are so honest (and so vulnerable to liars) is that they have difficulty developing a theory of mind...

Read on »

Great Moments in Scientific Theorizing

Category: Culture

This truth thing is difficult: In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call "ambulance chasing." He heard a rumor, while spending a year at...

Read on »

July 23, 2007

The Marketing of A Primate

Category: Culture

Are bonobos really such peaceful beatniks? Is is true that they like to make love, not war? The truth is that nobody really knows. Ian Parker has a fascinating profile of the species, and our attempts to learn about the...

Read on »

Bad Jury Verdicts

Category: Culture

False convictions are a by-product of our psychology

Read on »

July 20, 2007

Movement in Slow Motion

Category: Culture

This is the coolest study of movement since Muybridge....

Read on »

Golf, Choking and the Unconscious

Category: Culture

Why athletes choke.

Read on »

July 19, 2007

Morality and Materialism

Category: Culture

Ramesh Ponnuru, of the National Review, says this: What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism). If it is true that the universe consists...

Read on »

Mobs and Neuroscience

Category: Culture

Some crimes are beyond the pale of comprehension. This is one of those: After dark on June 18, the police say, as many as 10 armed assailants repeatedly raped a Haitian immigrant in her apartment at Dunbar Village and then...

Read on »

July 18, 2007

Chomsky for Breakfast

Category: Culture

Via Language Log...

Read on »

July 17, 2007

The Neuroscience of Gambling

Category: Neuroscience

What casinos have in common with cigarettes.

Read on »

July 16, 2007

Parrots and PTSD

Category: Culture

It's a brilliant new approach to treating the traumatized minds of war veterans: having them care for rescued and abused parrots. By developing a bond of trust with a bird, the PTSD patients slowly recover their faith in humanity. Listen...

Read on »

Lion Eating Apes

Category: Culture

Is this a living missing link? Scientists in the Congo have found a band of primates that seem to engage in some very sophisticated hunts. The Guardian reports: Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according...

Read on »

July 13, 2007

Expensive Coffee

Category: Culture

The finest coffee in the world comes from civet crap.

Read on »

Is Homosexuality An Accident?

Category: Culture

Yesterday, PZ linked to a short list of leading evolutionary explanations for homosexuality. On this subject, PZ is an ardent non-adaptationist: There are really just two classes of explanation [for homosexuality], the adaptationist strategy of trying to find a necessary...

Read on »

July 12, 2007

Williams Syndrome

Category: Neuroscience

David Dobbs has a wonderful article in the most recent Times Magazine on Williams syndrome, a development disorder that results in a bizarre mixture of cognitive strengths and deficits: Williams syndrome rises from a genetic accident during meiosis, when DNA's...

Read on »

Factoids of the Day

Category: Culture

On malaria and left turns.

Read on »

July 11, 2007

Kids Are Mean (Especially If You're Fat)

Category: Culture

It's easy to forget just how nasty kids can be. They might look cute, but they are such assholes. They prey on differences and disabilities, using taunts to generate solidarity. Middle school really is a terrible time. But I was...

Read on »

July 10, 2007

Lead and Crime

Category: Culture

Does lead poisoning create criminals?

Read on »

July 9, 2007

Sources of Inequality

Category: Neuroscience

Here's your depressing determinist paper for the day: Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features...

Read on »

The Struggle for Existence/Belief in Evolution

Category: Culture

So I finally sat down and watched Planet Earth on my new television. It's even better than everybody says: endless hours of the most extravagant nature porn ever put on film. But the show also got me thinking about evolution,...

Read on »

July 6, 2007

The Prius, Hot Rods, and Al Gore III

Category: Culture

When I first heard that Al Gore III was caught going 105 mph in a Prius, I was most impressed by the fact that a Prius can actually go that fast. You must really have to floor the Prius engine...

Read on »

July 3, 2007

Incentives

Category: Culture

The problem with incentives.

Read on »

Diversity and Science

Category: Culture

I just got back from spending a few days with a neuroscientist friend who recently became a PI, in charge of his own lab. On one of the walls in his lab, there was a map of the world with...

Read on »

Search All Blogs

Blogs in the Network

Top Five: Readers' Picks

Top Science Stories

powered by SEED - seedmagazine.com