By Ferris Jabr, Scientific American An excerpt: The English language is not especially kind to rats. We say we "smell a rat" when something doesn't feel right, refer to stressful competition as the "rat race," and scorn traitors who "rat on" friends. But rats don't...

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...

The Vexing Mental Tug-of-War Called Morality By Kristin Ohlson, Discover magazine Would you kill a crying baby to save yourself and others from hostile soldiers outside? Neuroscience offers new ways to approach such moral questions, allowing logic to triumph over deep-rooted instinct. You arrive at the...

Video from The Science Network Patricia Churchland is one of the most interesting public intellectuals of our time. Since the publication in 1986 of her seminal book “Neurophilosophy”, which began to explain the neural underpinnings of an enormous tradition of philosophy, Churchland has been a major...

By David Brooks, The New York Times The story of evolution, we have been told, is the story of the survival of the fittest. The strong eat the weak. The creatures that adapt to the environment pass on their selfish genes. Those that do not become extinct. In this telling, we humans are like all other...

The role of social cognition in moral judgment in frontotemporal dementia. By Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht, Teresa Torralva, Maria Roca, Mariángeles Pose, and Facundo Manes. Abstract: The role of social cognition in moral judgment in frontotemporal dementia. Abstract: Patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal...