W hen six senior Italian detectives arrived in Cairo in early February, following the discovery of the brutally battered body of 28-year-old Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, they faced long odds of solving the mystery of his disappearance and death. Egyptian officials had told reporters that…

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation.…

Robin Woods started reading the encyclopedia while he was in prison. When he found a typo, he wrote to the book’s editor, not sure if he would ever hear back. Photograph by Albane Doyet / EyeEm / Getty A few months ago, Robin Woods drove seven hours from his home, in Maryland, to visit a man named…

I was sitting in a large meditation hall in a converted novitiate in central Massachusetts when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. A woman in the front of the room gamely held a basket in front of her, beaming beneficently, like a priest with a collection plate. I duly surrendered my little…

"Hello, are you there?" "No, only trees." C.C. Pierce/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain This is the story of how a desert icon became, against all odds, a point of convergence for the masses, bridging the gap between the real and digital worlds. It was by pure happenstance that a man by the name of…

Geof Kern In the tentative, post-9/11 spring of 2002, I was, at 30, in the midst of extricating myself from my first marriage. My husband and I had met in graduate school but couldn’t find two academic jobs in the same place, so we spent the three years of our marriage living in different states.…

Michael/Flickr Programming computers is a piece of cake. Or so the world’s digital-skills gurus would have us believe. From the non-profit Code.org’s promise that ‘Anybody can learn!’ to Apple chief executive Tim Cook’s comment that writing code is ‘fun and interactive’, the art and science of…

Long dark highways and thin white lines; fire roads and Interstates; the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets; barefoot girls sitting on the hoods of Dodges; pink Cadillacs; last-chance power drives; men who go out for a ride and never come back. Bruce Springsteen’s song lyrics have injected…

Four years ago I was working in New York on a project. It was a strategy project for a big media company. They got 10,000 visitors a day. Whereas all my previous projects would get 1,000 hits a day or less. So it was 10 times bigger than anything I’ve ever worked on. One day I went to work, I…

I have reasons to resent Sabine Hossenfelder. 1: She has criticized my end-of-science thesis . 2: She’s a free-will denier . 3: Scientists who write for non-scientists make it harder for mere journalists to make a buck. In December, she lectured at a physics conference in Germany, and then she…

Love it or hate it, social media is no passing fad -- and increasingly it’s intertwined with more traditional academic platforms. Numerous scholars have popular blogs, for example, on which they test out new ideas and share research. Other academics have made names for themselves on Twitter or…

On arrogance in science | @LogicofScience https://t.co/4qNpHvbqSs https://t.co/6WkAak8q9k

How the online encyclopedia manages mental illness and suicide threats in its volunteer community. O ne recent Tuesday night in the suburbs of Sydney, Elliott* was sitting in front of his home computer, editing Wikipedia and debating with a fellow volunteer who was continually undoing his hard work.…

W hen I was young, there was nothing so bad as being asked to work. Now I find it hard to conjure up that feeling, but I see it in my five-year-old daughter. “Can I please have some water, daddy?” “You can get it yourself, you’re a big girl.” “WHY DOES EVERYONE ALWAYS TREAT ME LIKE A MAID?” That was…

"I just want to be happy." I can't think of another phrase capable of causing more misery and permanent unhappiness. With the possible exception of, "Honey, I'm in love with your youngest sister." In our super-positive society, we have a zero-tolerance policy for negativity. But who feels 'Great!'…

Malware that uses USB drives to covertly jump airgaps https://t.co/r1iWGIK4SY

How not to suck at science communication | @Shawpsych https://t.co/zZTXWqC2d1 https://t.co/eANgprRMzV

On exhaustion and self-care in academia | @raulpacheco | https://t.co/IGgYITd3cG https://t.co/RdXYf478fh

How To Blow Past Your Crowdfunding Goal Using Female Empowerment via @forbes https://t.co/ZI2XV0ADaO @TimbuktuMag @500startups #500strong

The audacious plan to save this man’s life by transplanting his head https://t.co/slZ2qm4v6u https://t.co/vqhlbg5hPg

Danjo Paluska/Flickr It began after I started as a teaching assistant at the department of physics. The first note was a classic – it proved Albert Einstein wrong. The second one solved the problem of quantum mechanics by dividing several equations through zero, a feat that supposedly explained…

Jussi Hieveta’s fourth-grade class at the University of Eastern Finland’s Normaalikoulu teacher training school in Joensuu, Finland. Spend five minutes in Jussi Hietava’s fourth-grade math class in remote, rural Finland, and you may learn all you need to know about education reform – if you want…

La Peste di Firenze It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they’re intended just to challenge and be part of a wider…

Gay rights supporters in the US celebrate after the 2015 supreme court ruling that same-sex couples have the right to marry.Photograph: Jim Bourg/Reuters Y our opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a…

President Obama works on his Cairo speech with speechwriter Ben Rhodes and national security aide Denis McDonough aboard Air Force One on June 4, 2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza) (Pete Souza/Official White House Photo) The tumult over Melania Trump’s speech this past week at the…

L ate capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence…

Science is in big trouble. Or so we’re told. In the past several years, many scientists have become afflicted with a serious case of doubt — doubt in the very institution of science. Explore the biggest challenges facing science, and how we can fix them: Academia has a huge money problem Too many…

Si può ridere di politica, di sicurezza nazionale, di religione, e lo possono fare i protagonisti diretti senza paura di perdere autorevolezza. Perché allora non dovrebbero farlo anche gli scienziati con la scienza? Il complicato rapporto tra scienza, divulgazione scientifica, e comicità. “No! No,…

A s the daughter of a senior colonel in China’s People’s Liberation Army, Ren Futong has lived all 17 years of her life in a high-walled military compound in northern Beijing. No foreigners are allowed inside the gates; the vast encampment, with its own bank, grocery store and laundromat, is…

Alle 21:14 del 22 Novembre 1987, i canali televisivi di Chicago mandavano ancora in onda i programmi previsti normalmente: intrattenimento, notizie, giochi. Quella sera, come al solito, Dan Roan, un noto presentatore sportivo locale del programma Nine O'Clock News su Channel 9, stava raccontando i…

I, SNOWBOT For a man accused of espionage and effectively exiled in Russia, Edward Snowden is also, strangely, free. Photograph by Bret Hartman/TED Snowden attending a TED conference in Vancouver in 2014. Edward Snowden lay on his back in the rear of a Ford Escape, hidden from view and momentarily…

Article on new 17 MeV boson spotted in nuclear transitions (and many more bosons previously claimed by same people) https://t.co/MVpUgqCw9e

Edmon de Haro As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind…

Do you entertain your kids with chess camp, art school, cooking classes, or tennis lessons during the unstructured summer months? Or perhaps all of them? There are activities and summer camps galore to fill children’s time and supply much needed childcare when kids are out of school. But…

Scientists’ personal life and career could suffer, should the challenges connected with living out-of-a suitcase become too high The forthcoming Annual Ceremony of the Graduate Campus for junior researchers at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in October 2016, will be focused on researchers’…

SAN FRANCISCO — Twenty-seven years ago, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a way for scientists to easily find information. It has since become the world’s most powerful medium for knowledge, communications and commerce — but that doesn’t mean Mr. Berners-Lee is happy with all of the…