Exploring the Books in Interstellar

The Internet is alive with book lists and speculation over the books seen in the Interstellar movie. Here are some possible explanations for what appears.

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The Truth About Oil

Over the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, Saudi Arabia blocked a proposed production cut by OPEC, sending oil prices plummeting around the world. As I write this the price of oil and gasoline futures are in collapse. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures are down over 10% to $66.15 a barrel on the near-month (January 2015) contract, Brent is at $70.15, and gasoline futures are down to $1.90.

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Why Everything You Think About Aging May Be Wrong

Researchers are finding that, as people get older, friendships, creativity and satisfaction with life all can flourish

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Technology is making us blind: The dangerous complacency of the iPhone era

The technology pages of news media can make for scary reading these days. From new evidence of government surveillance to the personal data collection capabilities of new devices, to the latest leaks of personal information, we hear almost daily of new threats to personal privacy. It’s difficult to overstate the implications of this: The separation of the private and public that’s the cornerstone of liberal thought, not to mention the American Constitution, is being rapidly...

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Heed the Warnings: Why We’re on the Brink of Mass Extinction

About 9:30 p.m. on Palm Sunday in 1965, a tornado struck Toledo, Ohio. I was just four years old and asleep when my Dad felt the pressure drop and called the family to the basement. I didn’t know what a tornado was, I just knew that it was terrifying. All I could hear as we huddled in the dark basement were fire trucks and ambulances racing nearby. The F4 twister cut a long swath of destruction that crossed just four blocks from my house. Fifteen people were killed, more than...

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How Dogs Understand What We Say

Dogs pay close attention to the emotion in our voices, but what about the meaning of words? A clever experiment with 250 canines shows that dogs understand more of our speech than previously thought.

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Spinal cord has successfully been grown in a lab

Researchers from the University of Dresden have used embryonic stem cells to grow an intact spinal cord in a petri dish, the team reported this week. It’s an enormous achievement in a field that has long viewed neural tissue as the ultimate challenge, and one which could give hope to millions of people suffering from spinal cord injuries.

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