Results for “Scientific American”

…any different if it had a creator. Recently there have been two widely publicized attacks on religious belief from the scientific community: the head-on attack from Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion or, the hard hitting sideswipe by Stephen Hawking in The Universe in a Nutshel...

…ny people.” I met Epstein around this time, on the flight out to TED. (Epstein had become an active backer of advanced scientific research and a fixture at the conference.) A small group assembled at the private plane terminal at JFK, most of us unfamiliar with our benefactor, a...

…and Galileo and Darwin are eventually resolved. Faith and ethics are widespread in our species and can be studied using scientific methods, including but not limited to fMRI, psychoactive drugs, questionnaires, et cetera. Very practically, we have to address the ethical rules th...

…n Franklin invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses, as well as charting the Gulf Stream and all manner of other scientific discoveries. He described his process for decision-making when there are many pros and cons to consider. “. my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Pape...

…oper of Skype and Kazaa. Max Tegmark is an MIT physicist and AI researcher; president of the Future of Life Institute; scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute; and the author of Our Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Inte...

…s that couldn’t care less about wrongly accused defendants, have shut the courtroom door to new evidence, including new scientific evidence. It may seem hard to believe but many judges and justices believe that it is not unconstitutional for an innocent person to be executed or t...

…ny people.” I met Epstein around this time, on the flight out to TED. (Epstein had become an active backer of advanced scientific research and a TED fixture.) A small group assembled at the private plane terminal at JFK, most of us unfamiliar with our benefactor, and as we heade...

…be created for entirely new biopharmaceutical products. While cancer is the leading disease area, this pace of dramatic scientific and technological progress is extending into several other areas of medicine and will likely accelerate. Many of the initial examples of targeted or...

…and Galileo and Darwin are eventually resolved. Faith and ethics are widespread in our species and can be studied using scientific methods, including but not limited to fMRI, psychoactive drugs, questionnaires, et cetera. Very practically, we have to address the ethical rules th...

…been calls from the hostages’ families to do something to end the ordeal. But as I later discovered, one of the leading scientific engineers in Israel, Yosef Tulipman, had a daughter among the passengers. Like Yitzhak, he had been a Palmachnik. He’d come to see the Prime Minister...

scientists and other employees of the EPA and USDA were told not to speak to the public about climate change or other scientific concerns that should be addressed.

…ntists are looking towards private donors for funding. Philanthropic dollars have now come to play an important role in scientific progress.

… force that we use in everyday life. The fact that gravity and magnetism are invisible to us does not place them beyond scientific scrutiny. Similarly, there are a host of forces that, over the course of human evolution, have emerged to influence our thoughts, emotions, and behav...

…e treatment of diseases and disorders. There are vast areas in medicine where large unmet medical needs exist and where scientific and technological progress is enabling entirely new approaches to addressing these. Where these intersect are areas of great opportunity for experien...

…at comes from taking the claims of religion seriously and an example of how religion can continue to feed and challenge scientific inquiry. References ' Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the God Spell (New Yo...