Aesthetic Representation of a Neuron1 The brain is capable of storing the computer equivalent of a petabyte, or 100 million gigabytes.1 That’s the equivalent of 4.7 billion books. It has 86 billion neurons, 400 miles of capillaries, 100 thousand miles of nerve fibers, and more than 10 trillion synapses.1 And yet, despite this, our memory […]

In the early 1770s London doctor Percival Pott noticed something strange about the chimneysweeps in his town: an unusually high percentage of them had a rare form of cancer. Most chimneysweeps at that time were boys under the age of fifteen because kids were better at squeezing into narrow chimneys. Orphans and street kids, most […]

This thread started by Ekaterina Damer has prompted many recommendations from psychologists on twitter. Here are most of the recommendations, with their recommender in brackets. I haven’t read these, but wanted to collate them in one place. Comments are open if you have your own suggestions. (Iris van Rooij)“How does it work?” vs. “What are […]

The word map in modern English is taken from the medieval mappa mundi, whereby the term mappa is the Latin for napkin, cloth, table cloth on which these philosophical representations of the Medieval world were first drawn or painted. In general, maps were representative pictures that expressed in some way the possessive concept of ours, we belong here, […]

Over the past few decades, Computer Science has become increasingly prevalent in finance and economics. Top financial firms are relying on computers to deliver results. For example, JP Morgan, Chase, and Barclays depend on supercomputers to estimate a stock portfolio’s risk or predict an asset’s future value. How do they do this? In this article, […]

For years now, many environmentalists and consumer advocates have called on the government to ban a chemical called bisphenol A or BPA. It’s found in various plastics like polycarbonate and the epoxy resins that line the inside of tin cans, and so it leaches into various foods (especially canned foods) at low concentrations. The FDA and […]

A project I’ve been working on a for a long time has just launched: The Choice Engine is an interactive essay about the psychology, neuroscience and philosophy of free will. To begin, follow and reply START — ChoiceEngine (@ChoiceEngine) September 20, 2018 By talking to the @ChoiceEngine twitter-bot you can navigate an essay about choice, […]

In the most recent episodes, we have been looking at developments in mechanics during the sixteenth century. Today we are going to turn to a different branch of what would become physics and cast a light on the development of optics in the sixteenth century. We left optics in the high middle ages with the […]

Senses are the way our brains interpret our environment. Many of us learned in school that humans have five senses — sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. We were also taught that many animals have more or less the same senses but within a different range. For example, while humans can see red, green, and […]

California governor Jerry Brown recently signed into law a bill that eliminates religious or philosophical exemptions for childhood vaccines. Under the new law, parents may only opt out of vaccinating their child if a doctor signs off on a medical exemption. The new law was controversial for a while, especially among California’s small but vocal […]