Author: Anthony Mariano

It’s well-known that statistics is a deceptively difficult topic to understand—at least, it’s well-known among people who’ve had some training about those deceptive difficulties. One concept, though, that seems to penetrate the barriers to statistical understanding is the normal distribution, the standard bell curve. Even if people don’t have the mathematical language to describe it, […]

Can the Large Hadron Collider spawn black holes at full power? CERN investigates.

How the unlikely and unexplainable, strange and terrifying, spawned the age of science.

Are some things too good to be true?

Gary Marcus can’t understand why people are shocked when he calls the brain a computer. The 43-year-old professor of psychology at New York University, author of Kluge, about the haphazard evolution of the brain, and a leading researcher in how children acquire language, grins and says it’s a generational thing. “I know there’s a philosophical school of […]

Profile subject Neil Harbisson is coming to Twitter to talk about merging with technology.

The space-time that makes up our universe is inherently uncertain.

When an enormous four-finned fish surfaced in a South African fisherman’s catch in 1938, scientists were fascinated by its resemblance to fossilized creatures that had died out millions of years ago. The fish, called a coelacanth, turned out to be the first descendant of those organisms ever spotted by humans. The two living species identified […]

What disdain and devotion have to do with the dawn of photography, evolution, and Lewis Carroll.

What Virginia Woolf’s writing table has to do with Darwin’s countryside cottage and Freud’s final couch.