Science, Medicine, & Education

By David Brin ENCINITAS, California — A recent, fascinating recent study is Decoding Animal Languages, by Con Slobodchikoff.  At one level, it is an inspiring demonstration of how new technologies can liberate us from preconceptions and open new avenues of empathy, helping humans to understand the other species who co-inhabit this planet with us. As […]

By Candice Mervis TEL AVIV — Professor Daniel Chamovitz is the director of the Manna Centre for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University and author of What a Plant Knows, a detailed look into how plants sense and deal with their environments. Chamovitz grew up in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, a small mill town. He was the

By Bruce Kesler ENCINITAS, California —Many of the finest and most honest minds – conservative and liberal — in and out of academia have argued, and sometimes succeeded, that campus speech codes often cross the line to suppression of First Amendment freedom of speech. The excesses in the wording of such codes, their arbitrary and

By David Brin ENCINITAS, California — Remember where you were when you heard or read about this. It’s important.  In a breakthrough effort for computational biology, the world’s first complete computer model of an organism has been completed, Stanford researchers reported last week in the journal Cell. A team used data from more than 900

By David Brin ENCINITAS, California–The future comes rushing upon us so quickly, already I worry that the world portrayed in my freshly minted novel will be old hat long before the time it is set, 30 years from now. (Meaning that we need futuristic and open-minded thought experiments now, more than ever.) Try these items

By David Brin ENCINITAS, California –Why freedom of the press concerns us all. Nick Cohen of Standing Point Magazine (UK) does a detailed retrospective and appraisal of my book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? He examines how far we have gone in the directions that I discussed, suggested….