Stories by John Horgan

Corvid cleverness is making news lately. Two of my favorite science writers, Sharon Begley and James Gorman, describe a variety of experiments--reported in PLOS One by researchers in New Zealand–in which crows mimic the hero of Aesop’s ancient fable “The Crow and the Pitcher.” By dropping objects into containers of water, crows raise the water’s [...]

Some idiot over at National Geographic just wrote a column titled “Science Is Running Out of Things to Discover,” and the commenters are hammering him.

The Sherlock Holmes era of my life has, sadly, ended. I just completed The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Kindle edition, four novels and 56 short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama have agreed to a plan to end war, according to a recording of a conversation between the two Presidents recently made available to “Cross-check” by the hacker collective Anonymous.

I get tired, now and then, of being such a sourpuss–a Debbie Downer, as my girlfriend calls me, always complaining about something. The wrongness of drone strikes and neuro-weapons research, the downside of psychiatric drugs and tests for cancer, hype about optogenetics and deep brain stimulation and theories of cosmic creation.

Russian-born physicist Andrei Linde, now at Stanford, has been in the news lately because of his contributions to inflation, a theory of our universe’s creation that has recently won support (although not from me).

Yesterday, I expressed doubts about claims that observations of gravitational waves provide “proof” of inflation, a 24 year old theory of cosmic creation.

I hoped I was wrong about inflation. For decades I’ve been bashing this theory of cosmic creation, lumping it together with strings, multiverses (which inflation has helped popularize) and other highly speculative propositions sprung from theorists’ fecund minds

All of us--researchers, journalists, patients and their loved ones–are desperate for genuine progress in treatments for severe mental illness.

In my last post, I criticized Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the new science series Cosmos, which is premiering tonight, for downplaying historical links between science and war.

I hope Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is a smash hit when it debuts Sunday night, as much so as the 1980 Cosmos hosted by astrophysicist Carl Sagan.

I’ve become, belatedly, a Sherlock Holmes groupie. I dig the BBC series Sherlock, starring the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, and the American series Elementary (which I prefer–Lucy Liu is the best Watson ever).

Once again, the United States government is chastising another nation for resorting to military force to solve a problem. The New York Times reports today that Russian troops, acting on orders of President Vladimir Putin, have swept into the Crimea region of Ukraine after a popular uprising led to the ouster of a pro-Russian government [...]

There is a shamefully broad gap between the lip service that we Americans give soldiersor “heroes,” as we love to call themand our actual treatment of them.

We just began a new undergraduate program in Science Communication at my school, Stevens Institute of Technology, and I’m agonizing over what to teach.

In a previous post, I suggested that brain implants might help couples resolve their differences. That’s an admittedly drastic solution, not to mention that implants for direct, brain-to-brain, wifi communication don’t exist yet.

The evidence keeps mounting that mammograms and other tests for cancerwhich contribute to the sky-high costs of U.S. health caredo not save lives.

February is the most anxious month. Every year at this time, I agonize over the Valentine’s Day Dilemma. What should I do to show my girlfriend, “Emily,” how much I love her?

I am a cyberwar skeptic. When U.S. officials and defense contractors warn of the looming threat of cyberattacks from China, Iran and terrorist groups, my bullshit detector lights up.

Could science’s replication crisis stem in part from how students are taught to perform experiments in college? That’s my suspicion after discussing the issue with students taking Introduction to Science Communication, a course I’m teaching for the first time at Stevens Institute of Technology.

Jared Diamond is one of the great science synthesizers and popularizers of our era, and he resists the biological determinism that infects so much modern theorizing about our species.

In 1997 the science agent and impresario John Brockman orchestrated a debate about my book The End of Science on his website, Edge.org, a forum where eggheadslet’s call them Edgeheads–chitchat about science-related stuff.

Yesterday, I wrote about science’s inability to explain the attraction some women feel for monsters. Fictional monsters. After posting, I learned that a real-life monster with whom I had an intense, long-term relationship just died.

“What does woman want?” Freud once whined. Turns out quite a few women want fantasy sex with T. rex, Sasquatch or a boar-headed god.