Biology
Will the Nature-Nurture Debate Ever End?
Biology writer Carl Zimmer answers questions on heredity, CRISPR, human enhancement, immortality and the coronavirus...
Stories by John Horgan
Public Health
A Liberal East Coast Science Writer Talks to a Pro-Trump Texan Strength Coach about COVID-19
A weight-lifting guru, author and podcaster calls the U.S. response to the pandemic an “exercise in hysteria" that might do more harm than good...
Public Health
Will COVID-19 Make Us Less Democratic and More like China?
The pandemic has revealed the disadvantages of laissez-faire governance and advantages of centralized control
Public Health
Will COVID-19 Make Us More Socialist?
Pundits hope the pandemic will lead to more humane government policies but fear darker outcomes...
Space & Physics
Remembering Big Bang Basher Fred Hoyle
The great astrophysicist Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) named the big bang theory but never embraced it...
Public Health
Does Surging Existential Dread Help Trump?
As fear of mortality rises, so does tribalism and support for authoritarian leaders, according to terror-management theory...
Public Health
Jolted by Her Own Illness, Pandemics Scholar Gains Insight into Botched COVID-19 Response
The author of book on the 2009 flu outbreak explains how a lack of effective tests crippled U.S. attempts to contain the coronavirus...
Mental Health
Meditating During the Plague
Is it ethical to seek serenity when the world is suffering?...
Space & Physics
Philip Anderson, Gruff Guru of Physics and Complexity Research, Dies
The Nobel Prize winner espoused an antireductionist vision of science in which “more is different”...
Policy
Good News: Women Helping Women in STEM
A physics student has founded an international organization for mentoring women in male-dominated fields...
Public Health
Optimism in a Dark Time
The coronavirus pandemic might have positive consequences...
Public Health
The Coronavirus and Right-Wing Postmodernism
Does right-wing skepticism toward the coronavirus have anything to do with the postmodern philosophy of Thomas Kuhn?...
Fitness
Astrology, Tarot Cards and Psychotherapy
With psychotherapists’ encouragement, troubled people are seeking solace in pseudoscientific practices such as astrology and tarot cards...
Space & Physics
Scientific Rebel Freeman Dyson Dies
The iconoclastic physicist rejected the idea of an end point to the human quest for knowledge and happiness...
Medicine
Responses to “The Cancer Industry: Hype vs. Reality”
Readers critique a journalist’s critique of cancer medicine...
Medicine
The Cancer Industry: Hype vs. Reality
Cancer medicine generates enormous revenues but marginal benefits for patients...
Space & Physics
What’s Wrong with Physics
A physicist slams hype about multiverses, string theory, and quantum computers and calls for more diversity in his field...
Cognition
Do We Possess a Transpersonal Imagination?
Some products of our imaginations seem to spring from sources beyond our everyday selves...
Cognition
My Go-To Arguments for Free Will
Free will must exist if some of us have more of it than others...
Cognition
Mysticism and the Mind-Body Problem: Other Views
Participants in a freewheeling exploration of nonmaterialist, mystical accounts of reality critique a journalist’s critique...
