By Tiffanny O'Callaghan, in The New Scientist Disgust can be a bewildering emotion. In her new book, That's Disgusting, research psychologist Rachel Herz points out that our tendency to react by pulling away is based on a combination of self-preservation and learned behaviour. When we are grossed...

By Colin Allen, New York Times A robot walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a screwdriver.” A bad joke, indeed. But even less funny if the robot says “Give me what’s in your cash register.” The fictional theme of robots turning against humans is older than the word itself, which first appeared in the...

From Science Daily Imagine a runaway boxcar heading toward five people who can't escape its path. Now imagine you had the power to reroute the boxcar onto different tracks with only one person along that route. Would you do it? That's the moral dilemma posed by a team of Michigan State University...

By Cordelia Fine, the Wall Street Journal 'If there were an Olympics of desiring," the philosopher William B. Irvine once observed, "we would all make the team." Desire animates us: What, quite literally, would we do without it? Yet all too often—for about four hours a day, according...

by Evan Lerner from Seed Magazine "Today, down in the descriptively named Research Triangle in North Carolina, more than 250 scientists, journalists, bloggers, programmers, and multi-hyphenated combinations thereof are planning the future of science communication on the web. (Practicing what it...

By Jonathan Zittrain | TED "The increasing proliferation of "tethered" devices, from iPhones to Xboxes, is only one of countless threats to the freewheeling Internet as we know it. There's also spam, malware, misguided legislation and a drift away from what Internet law expert Jonathan...

By Katherine Harmon | Scientific American "If love is said to come from the heart, what about hate? Along with music, religion, irony and a host of other complex concepts, researchers are on the hunt for the neurological underpinnings of hatred. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun...

By Jan Dönges | Scientific American "No one doubts that the words we write or speak are an expression of our inner thoughts and personalities. But beyond the meaningful content of language, a wealth of unique insights into an author’s mind are hidden in the style of a text—in such elements as how...

By Veronique Greenwood "In a famous set of experiments in the 1970s, children were observed trick-or-treating in the suburbs. Some were asked their names and addresses upon arriving at a door, while some were asked nothing. All were instructed to take just one piece of candy from the bowl, but as...