New robotics lab is asking big questions that will shape our future What makes a machine more than just a piece of hardware? Do we form relationships with our technology? How should we be teaching robots to act? And what … Continue reading IS A ROBOT A SOCIAL BEING?

How to Protect Sleep, Attention, and Family Relationships New research is a bit bleak when it comes to our success at managing our families’ screen use (especially our own), but we can do better!  By Caroline Knorr What do you do … Continue reading Parenting, Media, and Everything In Between

Ethical Tech / A 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity Note from Arthur Obermayer, friend of the author: In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston. The company was an MIT spinoff that originally … Continue reading Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?”

The pressures of national academic standards have pushed character education out of the classroom. A few months ago, I presented the following scenario to my junior English students: Your boyfriend or girlfriend has committed a felony, during which other people … Continue reading Students’ Broken Moral Compasses

It has been 50 years since we discovered that the human brain does not lie dormant at night, but instead cycles through organized, discrete sleep stages. Yet we are only now getting close to understanding the function, or functions, of … Continue reading Sleeping Brain, Learning Mind

Emerging evidence suggests that the brain encodes abstract knowledge in the same way that it represents positions in space, which hints at a more universal theory of cognition. We humans have always experienced an odd — and oddly deep — … Continue reading The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces

Most of us use the letters of the alphabet everyday, but did you ever stop to wonder how their shapes came to be? The history of the alphabet is fascinating, and each of the 26 letters has its own unique … Continue reading Colorful Chart Reveals Evolution of English Alphabet From Egyptian Hieroglyphics

This article was originally written by Stacy Pratt and published March 24th, 2017. It has since been expanded with new reporting by Kitty Lindsay. March is Women’s History Month, and to honor the occasion, we’re creating space for the women history … Continue reading 10 Native women you should have learned about in history class

Arctic people have been communicating with cetaceans for centuries. The rest of the world is finally listening in Other beliefs, too, are proving less farfetched than they once sounded. For years, scientists believed whales couldn’t smell, despite the fact that … Continue reading Why Scientists Are Starting to Care About Cultures That Talk to Whales

About five hundred million years ago, animals suddenly developed eyes and limbs—and possibly an inner life. Where does consciousness come from? When and how did it evolve? The one person I’m sure is conscious is myself, of course, and I’m … Continue reading The Explosive Evolution of Consciousness