Get Out of Your Own Way

WS Journal, by Robert L. Hotz - In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on incomplete [...]

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Your Brain Lies to You

NY Times - FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has [...]

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The Itch

New Yorker, by Atul Gawande - Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among [...]

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How Darwin won the evolution race

Guardian - It’s 150 years since Darwin made one of the the most significant breakthroughs in scientific history - the theory of natural selection. But if it hadn’t been for a young ornithologist on the other side of the world, his seminal work might never have appeared. Robin McKie tells the extraordinary story [...]

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Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Times - He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

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The Science of Racism

Root - Last fall, James Watson, the father of DNA, spoke the unspeakable, saying that blacks are intellectually inferior. In a conversation with The Root Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr., Watson clarified his views about race and genetics. Read what he says now — and why Gates regards him as “a racialist.”

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Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science

NY Times - The battle between the sciences and the humanities has been going on for so long, its early participants have stopped walking and talking, because they’re already dead.

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