Issue_51

29 articles
  • Bagenal_HERO

    Beyond Voyager

    Scientist Fran Bagenal on what’s next for space exploration.

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    What the Rumored Neutron Star Merger Might Teach Us

    In a sense, neutron star mergers are the largest hadron colliders ever conceived.Image by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Flickr This month, before LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, and its European counterpart Virgo, were going to close down for a year to undergo upgrades, they jointly surveyed the skies. It was a […]

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    The Case for Cosmic Pantheism

    Einstein, a professed pantheist, wrote that he experienced a “cosmic religious feeling,” a persistent awe at the “sublimity and marvelous order” of the universe. He was not alone.Credit: Internet Archive Aren’t those opposites?” people often ask me, when they discover I study science and religion. As a professor of religious studies, I am particularly drawn […]

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    When Dark Humor Stops Being Funny

    Experiencing small doses of negative emotions, elicited by an offensive joke, may make us more resilient to future, more serious set backs.Photograph by Barry Brecheisen / Getty Images In either ninth or tenth grade, my friend Dan and I found a book of “Truly Tasteless Jokes” on the cafeteria floor. Our teenage psyches were quickly […]

  • Dobson_HERO

    This Ecologist Wants to Tell You What Matters in Science

    “What physicists and astronomers do is trivial compared to solving these problems.”

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    Are You Downplaying Luck’s Role in Your Life?

    When we succeed, we often take that success, in retrospect, to be the result of suffering that liquid trinity of blood, sweat, and tears. Perhaps fortune favored you here and there but, by and large, it was your effort and talent—not contingency—that won the day.Nonsense, says Robert Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell University […]