Author: Charles Pineda

The director of the National Science Foundation on what brought her back to science.

Humans have come to fetishize dolphins: their smiles, their penchant for heavy petting, and they imbue their frolicking with moral assertions about one’s duty to live with abandon. These projections endear them to us. But the truth about what’s going on inside a dolphin’s head has very little to do with our human experience. Just […]

New regulations are applying network science to restructure global finance.

What the existence of zombies would do to our philosophy of mind.

On The Tonight Show, in March 1978, the late astronomer Carl Sagan had lots to talk about. He had just published Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence—which would win the Pulitzer Prize—and Star Wars, released the year before, still captivated the public’s imagination. When Johnny Carson, the show’s then-host, asked Sagan […]

A growing portion of the elderly look and act anything but.

Despite the hyperbole, private funding is changing the science of aging for the better.

For the past few years, social scientists have been buzzing over a particular topic in molecular biology—gene regulation. The hype has been building steam for some time, but recently, it rocketed to the forefront of public discussion due to a widely circulated piece in the New Yorker. Articles on the topic are almost always fascinating: […]

A trip to a Louisiana river delta reveals an ecosystem that is growing up.

Some time after he completed his first portrait, in 1909, Oskar Kokoschka realized that “in my haste, I painted only four fingers on the hand he lays across his chest.” He was referring to The Trance Player, a painting of his friend, an actor. “Did I forget to paint the fifth?” Kokoschka wondered. “In any […]