Quandary

Plants and animals have reproduced without sex for eons. So why did nature bother?

You make choices even if your atoms don’t.

The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.Photograph by Helen Cook / Flickr One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than […]

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. The galactic center shines too brightly, like the glow of a metropolis at night where maps show only a town. To mend their cosmic cartography, astrophysicists have spent years debating what could be powering this excess of energetic light. In 2015 the arguments appeared to swing decisively […]

A neuroscientist confronts his anguish over experimenting on animals.

What the hyper-rational Vulcan Spock represents, psychologist Igor Grossman said, is “uniform emotional down-regulation,” whereas the hallmark of Yoda’s judgment style is his ability to “recognize and balance a wide range of emotions”—a key aspect of wisdom.Star Wars / YouTube This past “Star Wars Day,” May 4, I watched some of the original trilogy a […]

The aversion to playing God is not just about God.

Purebreds don’t satisfy the biological definition of a species.

Why ethical objections to interfering with nature are too late.

What Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner taught me about being scooped.