By the time Steven entered grade school, it appeared that he had hit his stride. The twins seemed to have equalized into the genetic carbon copies that they were: They wore the same shoulder-length, sandy-blond hair. They were both B+ students. They played basketball with the same friends. Steven Elmore had seemingly overcome his rough start. But then, at the age of 17, he began hearing voices.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

In this age of fierce competition between Internet marketing and traditional retail, merchants want to know: Which approach stirs potential customers most?  Experiments by neuroeconomist Antonio Rangel and his colleagues suggest that the old pop song chorus—“Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby”—might have it right.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

One might as well say that conflict arises between men and women only when they stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble. Science produces discoveries that challenge long-held beliefs (not only religious ones) based on revelation rather than evidence, and the religious must decide whether to battle or accommodate secular knowledge if it contradicts their teachings.    <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

No group of believers has more reason to be sure of its own good sense than today’s professional scientists. There is, or should be, no mystery about why it is always more rational to believe in science than in anything else, because this is true merely by definition. What makes a method of enquiry count as scientific is not that it employs microscopes, rats, computers or people in stained white coats, but that it seeks to test itself at every turn.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

It has become my passion to expand evolutionary theory beyond the biological sciences to include all things human. Many people are puzzled about why this is necessary. After all, an enormous body of knowledge about humanity has accumulated without reference to evolution. Why is an evolutionary perspective needed now when it wasn’t needed in the past?  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The Ultimatum Game works like this: You are given $100 and asked to share it with someone else. You can offer that person any amount and if he accepts the offer, you each get to keep your share. If he rejects your offer, you both walk away empty-handed.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The world’s first known human cannibals ate each other to satisfy their nutritional needs, concludes a new study of the remains of cannibal feasts consumed about one million years ago.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

“Environmentalism, which in its raw, early form had no time for the encrusted, seized-up politics of left and right, has been sucked into the yawning, bottomless chasm of the ‘progressive’ left.” A personal, twenty-year journey through the world’s wild places and the movements to protect them is also, for Paul Kingsnorth, an education in the limits of a project that has forgotten nature and lost its soul.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The Earth has finite resources of matter. But thanks to its own internal heat and the light of the sun it has almost unlimited supplies of energy with which to remake itself over a vast range of timescales. Water lasts in the atmosphere for a fortnight or so; carbon dioxide stays in the oceans for thousands of years. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>