Last May, I took a trip to San Diego for my brother-in-law’s graduation from college, and to meet his 4-month old son, Landon, for the first time. Throughout the weekend, I couldn’t suppress my inner science nerd, and often found myself probing my nephew’s foot reflexes. Pressured from my wife’s disapproving looks and the blank stares I received from her family as I explained why his toes curled this way or that, I dropped the shop-talk in favor of baby-talk.

Last May, I took a trip to San Diego for my brother-in-law’s graduation from college, and to meet his 4-month old son, Landon, for the first time. Throughout the weekend, I couldn’t suppress my inner science nerd, and often found myself probing my nephew’s foot reflexes. Pressured from my wife’s disapproving looks and the blank stares I received from her family as I explained why his toes curled this way or that, I dropped the shop-talk in favor of baby-talk.

Last May, I took a trip to San Diego for my brother-in-law’s graduation from college, and to meet his 4-month old son, Landon, for the first time. Throughout the weekend, I couldn’t suppress my inner science nerd, and often found myself probing my nephew’s foot reflexes. Pressured from my wife’s disapproving looks and the blank stares I received from her family as I explained why his toes curled this way or that, I dropped the shop-talk in favor of baby-talk.

You are on a plane, thirty thousand feet above ground. Four hundred and fifty snakes crawl into the passenger cabin. You think this is terrifying? Hollywood producers certainly gambled on that when they released the 2006 summer blockbuster “ Snakes on a Plane .”  Israeli scientists, however, have come up with an even creepier scenario . [More]



Snakes on a Plane - Samuel L. Jackson - Shopping - Health - Pets

You are on a plane, thirty thousand feet above ground. Four hundred and fifty snakes crawl into the passenger cabin. You think this is terrifying? Hollywood producers certainly gambled on that when they released the 2006 summer blockbuster “ Snakes on a Plane .”  Israeli scientists, however, have come up with an even creepier scenario . [More]



Snakes on a Plane - Samuel L. Jackson - Shopping - Health - Pets

How pleasurable and desirable does this image of chocolate cake appear to you? [More]



Cake - Chocolate - Home - Cooking - Baking and Confections

"My heart starts to race, I can't breathe, I get all sweaty, and I feel very scared - like I am about to die."   [More]

When physicists puzzle out the workings of some new part of nature, that knowledge can be used to build devices that do amazing things -- airplanes that fly, radios that reach millions of listeners.  When we come to understand how brains function, we should become able to build amazing devices with cognitive abilities -- such as cognitive cars that are better at driving than we are because they communicate with other cars and share knowledge on road conditions.  In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering chose as one of its grand challenges to reverse-engineer the human brain.  When will this happen? Some are predicting that the first wave of results will arrive within the decade, propelled by rapid advances in both brain science and computer science . This sounds astonishing, but it’s becoming increasingly plausible. So plausible, in fact, that the great race to reverse-engineer the brain is already triggering a dispute over historic “firsts.” [More]

At age 22, Eliezer Sternberg has just published his second book on neuroscience and philosophy: “My Brain Made Me Do It,” now out from Prometheus Books. In it, he argues that our growing understanding of how the brain works does not mean the end of moral responsibility. Rather, he sees free will as a special property that emerges from more basic brain functions. A student at Tufts Medical School, he took time out from his first-year exams to talk with Mind Matters co-editor Carey Goldberg. [More]

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