Balance
35 articles-
Is Violence Declining Because We’re Evolving More Patience?
Impulsiveness is a heritable trait that may have been maladaptive in agrarian life.
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This Cancer Treatment Extends Life Without Pills, Radiation, or Surgery
The very act of existential unburdening proves to be life prolonging.Photograph by UpperCut Images / Getty What would go through your mind if I told you that you had cancer? Perhaps you’d wonder how you got it, or how you were going to get rid of it. Maybe you’d worry about whether you could keep […]
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The Quest for Unity Is Not Something Physics Is Cut Out to Do
If physics is understood as a descriptive mode of explanation, free of the unifying quest, the angst of not knowing it all is exorcised.Image by Andrew J. Hanson / Indiana University. In physics, we like theories that are simple and broad-ranging. By “simple,” physicists usually mean a mathematical theory that rests on as few postulates […]
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What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Fermi Paradox
The “signal leakage” of our communications is becoming more and more scarce, not more abundant.Illustration by Danielle Futselaar / Flickr Reports of U.F.O. sightings were commonplace in the 1950s. The C.I.A. recently came clean, on Twitter, concerning its role: “Reports of unusual activity in the skies in the ‘50s? It was us.” Though not entirely—some […]
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Ingenious: Lisa Feldman Barrett
Inside a new theory of emotions that spotlights how the brain works.
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The Woman Who Gave Us the Science of Normal Life
Before Rachel Carson there was Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT’s first female student.