I'm teaching Darwin again this semester, in two separate courses, and I'm confronted with a familiar dilemma: How should I respond to students who reject evolutionary theory on religious grounds?One course is a freshman survey of the humanities and social sciences, and the other reviews the history of science and technology...
Over the past two days, The New York Times published a two-part essay titled "Rethinking the 'Just War,'" by philosopher Jeff McMahan of Rutgers. I got excited when I spotted the headline on the Times website yesterday...
In 2005, I became, briefly, a tool of the military-industrial complex. My service began when I received an email from Centra Technology, a defense contractor.
I've been trying to come up with something to say about Sandy that hasn't already been asserted and questioned and reasserted and so on. So I thought I'd talk about how nuclear plants weathered the storm.As I mentioned in a previous post, environmentalists in my hometown and throughout New York want to permanently close the Indian Point nuclear plant, which they see as a potential "Fukushima on the Hudson," as the green group Riverkeeper put it...
How's this for a confluence of cultural currents? A British scientist chats about psychopaths with an American actor who plays a psychopathic serial killer on TV in front of an audience at a museum loaded with Buddhist art...
Last week the man whom The New Yorker called "the most influential living philosopher" came to my school, Stevens Institute, to talk about "Ethics and the Election." Peter Singer, who was raised in Australia and now teaches at Princeton and the University of Melbourne, espouses utilitarianism, an ethics that seeks to minimize suffering and maximize wellbeing.Singer's work is challenging, not because his writing is difficult to understand but because it is all too clear...
Cold Spring, New York, my lovely Hudson River home, has long been a hotbed of environmental activism. In 1962, the utility Consolidated Edison announced plans to carve a power plant out of stately Storm King Mountain, just across the Hudson from Cold Spring...
Fed up with Obomney? Sick of both Democrats and Republicans? Do you see the parties' similarities—their cowardly hawkishness and craven obeisance to deep-pocketed donors--as more significant than their differences?...
Earlier this week the legendary biologist Robert Trivers gave a talk, "Why We Lie (even to ourselves)," to a packed auditorium at my school, Stevens Institute of Technology.
Last spring, I offered a harsh assessment of A Universe from Nothing (Free Press, 2012), in which physicist Lawrence Krauss proposed that physicists have finally, probably, maybe, sort of, answered The Question of All Questions: Why is there something rather than nothing?...
There's no such thing as objective science journalism, any more than there is objective science. Some journalists are just more overt about their biases.Gary Taubes has been ferociously attacking conventional dietary wisdom for more than a decade...
Last year, on the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States, I posted a column arguing that the U.S. overreacted to these horrific acts of terrorism...
Presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Barack Obama recently answered 14 science-related questions put to them by Scientific American and ScienceDebate.org.
The death of astronaut Neil Armstrong arouses memories and mixed emotions.In the summer of 1969, my family and I spent a month on Nantucket Island, off the coast of Massachusetts.
William Thurston, who died on August 21 at the age of 65, would have hated this post's headline. Let me tell you why it's justified.In 1993, when I was a full-time staff writer for Scientific American , my boss, Jonathan Piel, asked, or rather, commanded me to write an in-depth feature on something, anything, mathematical...
I bought a Kindle recently, and excitedly downloaded free stuff: Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (not as good as I remembered), stories of H.P.
John Keegan, whom The New York Times called "the preeminent military historian of his era," is dead. 78 years old, he died after a long illness in England, where he was born and bred.
Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com , a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com , the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German , Spanish and Dutch ...
The Summer Olympics have finally begun! Time to celebrate the extraordinary talent, fortitude and grace of athletes representing the world's diverse nations, from Iceland to Chile.
Here are basic facts about the massacre that took place in Aurora, Colorado, early yesterday morning. A 24-year-old man, James Holmes, opened fire in a movie theater with an AR-15 assault rifle and other weapons that he had purchased legally...
