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...

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 Michael Torrice from Science "Some people can read your face and know you've had a bad day. Others seem oblivious. Now, researchers have pinpointed a genetic explanation for why some people are better empathizers than others. Empathy is crucial for our everyday social interactions. Neuroscientists...

By: Kathleen McGowan "Why does being bad feel so good? Pride, envy, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth: It might sound like just one more episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, but this enduring formulation of the worst of human failures has inspired great art for thousands of years...

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...