Last month, Harvard University named a new Chief Chaplain: Greg Epstein, an atheist. As reported in The New York Times,1 Epstein, the campus humanist chaplain, was unanimously elected to “coordinate the activities of more than 40 university...

Let me tell you what it’s like to be an astrobiologist.I painted a white picket fence this summer. No one asked me to. It was a task I’d set myself without realizing what a long-winded and frustrating process it would be. But eventually tha...

Do you ever feel like someone is watching you? They could be. And I’m not talking about the odd neighbors at the end of your street.This summer, at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University and the American Museum of Natural History in...

If we medically insulate, or precipitously shield, emerging adults from introspection and struggle, from the work of figuring out life’s big questions, it could prevent them from effectively coping with depression later in life.Illustration...

Our General Resonance Theory of consciousness, a framework with a panpsychist foundation, may, at least in theory, provide more complete answers to the full array of questions the hard problem of consciousness poses.Image by Illustration Fo...

The following is adapted from a speech Roger Payne gave at this year’s Interspecies Internet conference. His remarks have been lightly edited for clarity.Because I am involved with the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or Project CETI, I rec...

The beachfront narrows to an ocherous ribbon, belted by blue, above and below. After a while, a handful of shearwaters appear in the air above the Cat Balou. The birds flash around us; like knife-thrower tricks at a circus. Diving through t...

It’s been more than 50 years since biologist Roger Payne brought whale song into the lives of millions via the popular album, Songs of the Humpback Whale. At the time, commercial whaling had decimated global whale populations, and Payne’s r...

There are ways we get smarter with age, even in the domain of fluid intelligence.Photo Illustration by meboonstudio / ShutterstockMany have noted that the big contenders in the last two American presidential elections were well into their 7...

Our human world is soaked in light. For starters there are the 100,000 trillion photons arriving every second at every square centimeter of Earth’s dayside surface, after racing here from the outer envelope of a natural giant thermonuclear...

What is the role of reasonable doubt in advancing science? And how should we contrast scientific doubt with the cavilling doubt of conspiracy theories which play little part in advancing understanding? Over the last year we have seen the sc...

I walked out of the airlock onto the blood-red Martian surface. My mind was crystal clear and laser focused. There was no room for panic or anxiety as I surveyed the landscape and remembered the job ahead. I had conditioned my body to insti...

“Occasionally, when Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch, to a better, happier place …” —Arundhati Roy, The God o...

In high school, Daniel Stein built a solar-powered car and drove it across the country. “I got to see the possibility of doing something with my own hands and seeing the success of taking action for what you believe in,” he says, some 30 ye...

Science is not just something we do at school or professionals undertake in labs. It is at the heart of how everything works. With the development of applied scientific principles, science enables us to not only understand how things work b...

What should you do if you are worried about your popularity? Relax. Despite what Facebook tells us, it’s the quality of friendships that count, not the quantity, and certainly not your average popularity.Photograph by Ivelin Radkov / Shutte...

When I was about 6, my mind did something wondrous, although it felt perfectly natural at the time. When I encountered the name of any day of the week, I automatically associated it with a color or a pattern, always the same one, as if the...

Humans have always strived to develop technologies that give us some control, or at least the feelings of control, over the challenges that life throws at us. Psychologists like me devote our professional lives to figuring out why people th...

On March 11, 2021, the auction house Christie’s sold a work by an American graphic designer, Michael Winkelmann, a.k.a. Beeple, for a colossal $69 million, making it the third most expensive work ever sold by a living artist. The work, Ever...

Requiring vaccine passports would not violate any individual rights that a well-ordered society would choose to defend.Photograph by FrankHH / ShutterstockThe latest surge in COVID-19 cases in the United States has been called a pandemic of...

Last month, having returned to Earth aboard his Blue Origin spacecraft, Jeffrey Bezos, the chairman of Amazon and, as of this month, the richest person alive with over $200 billion, made an awkward show of gratitude. On stage at a press con...

The idea of cryogenically freezing a person to preserve their body until many years into the future has long been a staple of science-fiction stories. However, the need to reliably store biological materials such as cells or tissue is a com...