The 1950s were the first sign that with a booming economy, progressive busy-bodies were going to once again turn their sights on controlling behavior. Though Prohibition had ended the Puritan Piety attack on alcohol, and Hitler had put a halt to progressive dreams of eugenics, the war on inferiors continued by well-meaning elites unabated after the soldiers came home.

Is there a fifth force of Nature, beyond the four we know about ? This question has been around ever since it was understood that 
1 - electric charges attract and repel, and influence one another, due to the action of the electromagnetic force;


2 - hadronic matter is held together by the strong force;


3 - quarks transmute into other quarks due to the action of the weak force (and leptons do that too);


4 - bodies carrying mass feel attracted to one another, although very weakly, by the gravitational force.

You know you are in a wealthy country when there are articles about how people are depressed if they can't get a $2,000 Macbook, young people can talk about how bored they are, and poor families live in more square footage than the middle class in France.

Oh, and a majority are fat, even among poor people. It was never before possible for poor people to be obese, abundance of food used to be a sign of wealth.

Many people feel anxious about the prospect of their death. Indeed, some philosophers have argued that death anxiety is universal and that this anxiety bounds and organizes human existence. But do we also suffer from birth anxiety? Perhaps. After all, we are all beings that are born as well as beings that die.

Whereas philosophers have said a lot about our anxiety about death, they have said little about birth anxiety. This is part-and-parcel of the broader neglect of birth in the Western philosophical tradition. The guiding thought has been that ‘all men are mortal’ (‘men’ in the sense of ‘human beings’) rather than ‘all human beings are mortal and natal’.

NASA have put a great deal of work into the engineering for a sample return but I can't find any papers or blog posts or any sign of prepration for the legal side of the return mission. We are strongly protected by many environmental laws and laws to protect human health that we didn’t have at the time of Apollo. These laws don’t rely on the Outer Space Treaty for their legal basis. How NASA categorizes Mars makes no difference to them. See the article by Margaret Race of the SETI institute.

While they last, gamma-ray bursts outshine stars and even galactic quasars. They are the most energetic phenomenon known to humankind, resulting from the formation of neutron stars or black holes as dying stars collapse. They are triggered by outflows of plasma ejected near the speed of light. 

They usually display energies in the region of tens of giga-electron-volts but why not even greater? Indeed, it is no longer speculation, a gamma-ray burst in the region of a tera-electron-volt has been detected. Which means these energies might actually be common.

The evolution of the snake body has captivated researchers for a long time because it represents one of the most dramatic examples of the vertebrate body's ability to adapt. A limited fossil record has obscured our understanding of their early evolution but now an ancient legged snake, called Najash has shed light on the origin of the slithering reptiles.


The fossil analyses reveal they possessed hind legs during the first 70 million years of their evolution, and provide details about how the flexible skull of snakes evolved from their lizard ancestors.

Scientists performed high-resolution (CT) scanning and light microscopy of preserved skulls of Najash to reveal substantial new anatomical data on the early evolution of snakes.

Ask anyone to name a philosopher and they’ll likely name a man. So, let’s turn the spotlight on three women: Mary Calkins, May Sinclair, and Hilda Oakeley. They each defended “idealism” – the idea that consciousness composes, or somehow pervades, the universe we live in.

Big consciousness theories are trending right now. Ecologists such as Suzanne Simard argue trees can “talk”, and philosophers such as Philip Goff argue elementary particles exhibit basic forms of consciousness. These women should be remembered as part of this blooming tradition.

Before Chomsky, there was Lippmann: the First World War and ‘manufactured consent.’

While the ‘manufacture of consent’ is an idea now mostly associated with Noam Chomsky, the phrase was actually coined by the US journalist and writer Walter Lippman in his influential book "Public Opinion" (1922) – a fact that Chomsky and Edward Herman, his co-author on "Manufacturing Consent" (1988), readily acknowledge. 

Lippman contended that, because the world is too complex for any individual to comprehend, a strong society needs people and institutions specialized in collecting data and creating the most accurate interpretations of reality possible.

Though homosexual behavior has been rewarded in over 1,000 organisms, it can be an evolutionary puzzle; since reproduction can't happen, there is a fitness cost, so why do it?