The Social Nestwork

That thing? It’s just a monster living in Microsoft’s basement. And it’s wearing someone’s face...

During the 1800s, Western culture morphed its distaste for olfaction into a belief that the human sense of smell was mediocre and superfluous...

Improvisation was part of the technological expedition: a mule was responsible for the Danjon telescope while the astronomer lit a fire to make some smoke...

Does the universe have a beginning in time? If so, is it an argument for theism?

The Starship cabin is not ultimately intended for trips “under an hour,” but in fact for journeys of multiple months...

Just like the nuclear revolution, the possible ramifications of the quantum revolution reach far beyond the spheres of academia and may become instrumental in security and warfare...

The standard laws of physics — such as quantum theory, general relativity, even Newton’s laws — are formulated in terms of trajectories of objects and what happens to them given some initial conditions. But there are some phenomena in nature that you can’t quite capture in terms of trajectories...

To be frozen, and come back to life. It is fantastical. And yet, it seems to be true...

As the 1960s opened, the Order of the Dolphin was dismayed as it became clearer that the Milky Way was no cacophonous cloud of thinking stars...

We are living, at least in the West, in the days of the health religion. And whoever doubts it is a blasphemer...

We're in a dance with the tools we make and the technologies we create...

It was reported that platypus fur glows blue-green under UV light...

The animal that departed most from the fossil evidence was Dilophosaurus. In the movie, it takes the form of a golden retriever–sized creature with a rattling frill and venomous spit...

If humans are capable of instigating multiple origins of life under a broader array of circumstances than life currently exists, ought we to do it?

If the history of physics with its creative interplay between frogs and birds is any guide, there is much cause for optimism...

H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel The War of the Worlds has never lost its power to unsettle, but it has become peculiarly resonant with the arrival of Covid-19...