Author: Mary

This story from New Scientist describes the latest news about the intelligence of birds in the crow family, in this case rooks. Pairs of birds were able to figu...

This is the second year in which Daylight Saving Time in the US began at the new, earlier date of the second Sunday in March. I hate the whole concept of DST, a...

One standard piece of advice to novice writers is to try to separate the production and editing phases of writing. In other words, when you’re creating ne...

In recent years we’ve learned that a number of capabilities we once thought unique to humans are in fact shared by other species: tool use, some aspects o...

The other day I ran across this post at Brains on Purpose, which I found very interesting and somewhat discomfiting, as it describes the dangers of popularizing...

This article from the New York Times discusses several online dating services that try to use scientific methods to help people find the best long-term romantic...

I had a dream once where there was some kind of gizmo that I could hook up to my brain (painlessly, no mess) and then use to play back my memories on a TV scree...

There seems to be something inherent in human beings that makes them relatively unhappy in their middle years. Researchers analyzed data from people all around ...

One of the books I’m reading at the moment is Ilium, a science fiction novel by Dan Simmons that is set in the future and features such exotica as quantum...

We all anthropomorphize from time to time. I’ve speculated about whether we sometimes do this because we feel an irrepressible urge to attribute a mind li...