How Plants Secretly Talk to Each Other

Up in the northern Sierra Nevada, the ecologist Richard Karban is trying to learn an alien language. The sagebrush plants that dot these slopes speak to one another, using words no human knows. Karban, who teaches at the University of California, Davis, is listening in, and he’s beginning to understand what they say.

Eradicating Polio

IN 1988 THERE WERE 350,000 CASES OF POLIO WORLDWIDE. LAST YEAR THERE WERE 223. BUT GETTING ALL THE WAY TO ZERO WILL MEAN SPENDING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, PENETRATING THE MOST REMOTE REGIONS OF THE GLOBE, AND FACING DOWN TALIBAN MILITANTS TO GET TO THE LAST UNPROTECTED CHILDREN ON EARTH.

Remembering the children of Sandy Hook

Author Matthew Lysiak speaks about his new book "Newtown: An American Tragedy." that examines Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza's life and the events leading up to and following the tragedy.

Our Drone Future

This three-minute video from designer Alex Cornell imagines a future San Francisco in which an autonomous (seemingly police or military) drone is set free to patrol the skies of the city by the bay, in order to keep its citizens “safe.” We won’t give away the ending, but it’s safe to say that the video reflects the tenor of the debate over whether or not more-evolved versions of the drones that America currently flies over war zones will ever be allowed to patrol domestic skies. It also comes as more individuals, including presumably the filmmakers, are pushing the limits of federal aviation regulations as they fly drones such as the DJI Phantom around US cities.

Paying Amy

Countless numbers of people have seen the pictures of 8-year-old “Amy,” as she is called in court documents, being sexually abused by her uncle. She is a victim of child pornography in a terrible, viral way. Since her uncle took the pictures in the late 1990s and sent them to a man he met through an AOL bulletin board, they have surfaced on the computers of child pornography collectors all over the world, factoring into 3,200 criminal cases in the United States alone.

Every Black Hole Contains a New Universe

Our universe may exist inside a black hole. This may sound strange, but it could actually be the best explanation of how the universe began, and what we observe today. It's a theory that has been explored over the past few decades by a small group of physicists including myself.

Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection. At a black hole, Albert Einstein's theory of gravity apparently clashes with quantum physics, but that conflict could be solved if the Universe were a holographic projection.

Trigger Effect

On a clear blue day on Jan. 17, 1989, a man whose peripatetic life included years as a troubled Sacramento youth walked onto a playground in Stockton and shot 35 children, killing five. In the span of only a few minutes, the act marked the first mass shooting of schoolchildren in American history. Today, 25 years later—and one year after the massacre at Newtown—these once-unthinkable tragedies have become terrifyingly familiar as citizens and political leaders from Sacramento to Washington choose sides in the fight over the future of guns in America.

U.S. Women Are Dying Younger Than Their Mothers, and No One Knows Why

While advancements in medicine and technology have prolonged life expectancy and decreased premature deaths overall, women in parts of the country have been left behind.

Daniel Wolpert: The real reason for brains

Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise: the brain evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement. In this entertaining, data-rich talk he gives us a glimpse into how the brain creates the grace and agility of human motion.

Sam Harris - It Is Always Now

Appreciate the moment !!!

Sizing Up Consciousness by Its Bits

If Dr. Tononi is right, he and his colleagues may be able to build a “consciousness meter” that doctors can use to measure consciousness as easily as they measure blood pressure and body temperature.

Big Thinkers - Daniel Dennett [Philosopher]

This episode features Daniel Dennett. He is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. I thought this was a good follow up to the previous post "Keeping Alive The Big Question".

Keeping Alive The Big Questions

Evgenia Cherkasova, a philosophy professor at Suffolk University, will teach a course next year that's called, What is the Meaning of Life?

Washington's Open Secret

Most Americans believe it's illegal for politicians to profit from their public office but, as Steve Kroft reports, that's not the case.

CHINA IS ENGINEERING GENIUS BABIES

Scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.

Bullying Complaint After Lopsided Football Score

The final score, 91-0 led one parent to file an official complaint of bullying against the entire coaching staff.

Rudy

An animated self-portrait exploring the idea of rebirth and illustrating the transfer of energy from one incarnation to another. I painted this stop frame animation on myself over 5 days, using some face paints, a mirror and a camera. By Emma Allen

Photo captures an eagle wrestling a deer

A camera trap set out for endangered Siberian (Amur) tigers in the Russian Far East photographed something far more rare: a golden eagle capturing a young sika deer.

Cicada 3301

For the past two years, a mysterious online organisation has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolveable problems. But to what end? Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301

Toms River: Cancer Clusters

One of New Jersey’s seemingly innumerable quiet seaside towns, Toms River became the unlikely setting for a decades-long drama that culminated in 2001 with one of the largest legal settlements in the annals of toxic dumping. A town that would rather have been known for its Little League World Series champions ended up making history for an entirely different reason: a notorious cluster of childhood cancers scientifically linked to local air and water pollution. For years, large chemical companies had been using Toms River as their private dumping ground, burying tens of thousands of leaky drums in open pits and discharging billions of gallons of acid-laced wastewater into the town’s namesake river.

Fermi Paradox

Why haven't we been contacted yet ? Maybe it's not that life is rare in the universe... Maybe it's that intelligent life is really rare...

Could we speak the language of dolphins?

Denise Herzing discusses what she learned in 28 years of working with dolphins.

My Lai Massacre Remembered

1968, Forty Years Later: My Lai Massacre Remembered.

Neuroscience and Society

As neuroscience starts to explain society's evils...

Last Chimp Standing

Interview with author Chip Walter who wrote "Last Chimp Standing".

Bottlenose Dolphin Rescue

A Bottlenose Dolphin needed help to get a fishing hook and line of it's left pectoral fin...

Will our kids be a different species?

Throughout human evolution, multiple versions of humans co-existed. Could we be mid-upgrade now? Juan Enriquez sweeps across time and space to bring us to the present moment -- and shows how technology is revealing evidence that suggests rapid evolution may be under way.

Climate Of Doubt

FRONTLINE explores the massive shift in public opinion on climate change.

Origins of Modern Humans

John Noble Wilford interviews the paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.

Strange answers to the psychopath test

Is there a definitive line that divides crazy from sane? With a hair-raising delivery, Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, illuminates the gray areas between the two.