One self important minister who tends to LESS THAN FIFTY parishioners had national newscasters intoning sober pronouncements about his opinions on the Quran all this week? Are we serious? Is […]

A quick bit of news on a sunny Ohio Sunday: The Alaska Volcano Observatory twitter account mentioned that a ~7.5 km / 25,000 foot ash plume has been detected from […]

People like to use categories for people (race, religion, nation, class, gender) as explanations for others’ behavior (for example, I was late because there was traffic and I have a […]

"The key issue facing everyone in the next decade is figuring out how to use the Internet and how to discern its societal benefits from its over-hyped Utopian promises."

"A result of a certain kind of overparenting, we are learning, is children who are better prepared for college but less prepared for life." Lisa Belkin says parenting has become too sacred.

"The loss of linguistic diversity means permanently shutting the door on a vast wealth of potential scientific knowledge." Obit's Axel Rose on the downside of English as lingua franca.

"There's a better reason for the non-fanatical to return to an antiquated medium like vinyl. Listening to music on a computer or iPod via headphones has become the ultimate in anti-social activities."

"What explains the ascendance of Homo sapiens? Start by looking at our pets." The Boston Globe says our ability to domesticate and control other species accounts for our formidable rise.

"How does one come to have certain ideas about L.A. without actually experiencing it?" n+1 meditates on the sun, fun and doom captured in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis.

"Under our current system of campaign finance, there is a fundamental gap between the interests of voters and of contributors." Harvard's Lawrence Lessig on the Congress' institutional corruption.

"Either you and everyone you love are going to be killed by robots; or you are going to live forever." A.I. guru Michael Vassar on what future technology has in store for humans.

"Athletic teams, administrators and tenured professors soak up huge chunks of colleges' budgets, and tuition and fees rise to keep up." The L.A. Times follows the money trail.

"If the past is any guide, plenty of today’s science will be discredited in future. There is no reason to think that today’s practitioners are uniquely immune to the misconceptions."

The latest product from fuseproject brings a whole new meaning to the “design for good” conversation. FORM3 is a waterproof rechargeable designer vibrator made out of medical-grade silicone and designed […]

A world free of disease and poverty. A dictatorial and all-powerful artificial intelligence. Picnics on sunny days with one’s grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. Genetically engineered dangerous mutants. Which one of […]

“It’s been a dream in the minds of many people to associate the excitement of sense and olfaction and perfumes with other elements from the entertaining world,” says Laudamiel. His […]

Perfumers sometimes aim to recreate the scents of things not typically associated with smell.

The world of perfumery must borrow the language of music, botanics, architecture, and taste—and apply them in a rigorous and objective way—to describe its fundamental elements.

When you smell a perfume you may be smelling hundreds of molecules at once, but the best nose in the world cannot smell more than five distinct scents.

Judging a fine fragrance is like watching the pieces of a puzzle fit together, or examining the many facets of a building, Christophe Laudamiel.