It’s time to let scientists study whether LSD, marijuana and ecstasy can ease psychiatric disorders Discovery of new psychiatric medication, whether for the treatment of depression, au... Read more
Imagine if there were a simple single statistical measure everybody could use with any set of data and it would reliably separate true from false. Oh, the things we would know! Unrealistic t... Read more
Everyone needs a little light relief sometimes, including the Nobel winning economist and writer/blogger extraordinaire Paul Krugman. A few months back he reminded the world of a short paper... Read more
Octopuses offer an extreme engineering challenge: They are almost infinitely flexible, entirely soft-bodied and incredibly intelligent. Are we vertebrate humans ever going to be able to buil... Read more
Just as the industrial age produced the laws of thermodynamics, we need universal laws of complexity to solve our seemingly intractable problems As the world becomes increasingly complex and... Read more
People have no idea what calorie counts on menus mean for their health, but if you tell them a dish will take two hours of exercise to work off, they start thinking differently. Fast food es... Read more
A variety of legal measures are needed to protect against potential abuses of gargantuan genetic repositories. Cops can collect DNA when making an arrest, sometimes before charging a person... Read more
The head of Bell Labs Research says the Internet should deal in information rather than simply bits and bytes The number of smartphones, tablets and other network-connected gadgets will outn... Read more
“New areas of research in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.” Desktop 3-D printers can already pump out a toy trinket, gear set or even parts to make another printer. Medical rese... Read more
Enabling the artificial muscles to lift more than 100,000 times their own weight and generate 85 times more mechanical power during contraction than mammalian skeletal muscles of comparable... Read more
A preference for recent advances Tech investor Yuri Milner, who shook the physics world two months ago by dishing out $27 million to the nine inaugural awardees of his Fundamental Physics Pr... Read more
Irrigation has helped farmers feed a population that has now reached 7 billion people. But in many places farmers have overused underground aquifers that have taken thousands of years to for... Read more
Intense competition among scientists has led to abuses. Is there a better way? When Isaac Newton developed calculus and his theory of gravity, he reaped a reward far greater than stock optio... Read more
A new app and Web site may make it easier to predict storm surges Researchers have had a notoriously difficult time predicting how much flooding a given area will experience in the wake of a... Read more