The other day I went to a talk about the fall and revival of metaphysics, given by Sebastian Kolodziejczyk at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Metaphysics these days has a bad…

Some of Hezbollah’s social institutions are functionally better than similar US institutions, and they function better because of science and our information age’s role in enhancing social, economic…

It is obvious that life is filled with choices and we often go to great lengths to explore different possible outcomes or scenarios when attempting to make decisions.  However what is choice and…

Being a skeptic is a rather lonely art. People often confuse you for a cynic, and I’m not using either term in the classical philosophical sense, of course. In ancient Greece, the cynics were people…

Years back, conversing with a now long-retired dean, I happened to let slip the words “common sense.” He replied, “It’s been a long time since I heard that phrase uttered on this…

    In December of 2006, two coinciding events occurred.  Saddam Hussein's death was youtubed and Bill Gates published an article in Scientific American called "A Robot in Every…

Informed consent is tricky business because there are disagreements about what informed consent can mean outside the country of the company conducting the trial and people will grant a lot of consent…

Scientists are often assumed to be obsessed by definitions. After all, if you cannot precisely define a concept, say what a planet is, or what a biological species is, you literally don’t…

Sometimes people are attracted to strange things. I still have trouble figuring out how people procreated in the 1970s and 80s - the hair, the moustaches, boys wearing those teeny short shorts - yuck…

If you have a Facebook page (we do) or any social media account, you may post varying amounts of personal information you want to share online with family, friends and colleagues - but a new study…