Boffins have built what could be one of the world's smallest working detectors of elusive neutrino particles ( Read more... )

In the last blog, I questioned the creative role of natural selection in evolutionary innovation. To clarify further what I had in mind, this blog will look at one of the truly creative processes of tremendous importance in evolutionary history: symbiotic mergers of two distinct organisms to generate a third new one (symbiogenesis). Without ( Read more... )

Materialism holds the high ground these days in debates over that most ultimate of scientific questions: the nature of consciousness. When tackling the problem of mind and brain, many prominent researchers advocate for a universe fully reducible to matter. ‘Of course you are nothing but the activity of your neurons,’ they proclaim. That position ( Read more... )

Greek philosophic term of the week:
Physis - “Nature”, from verb phynai (aorist pass. inf.), “to grow, to be begotten or born”. When we speak of Nature, we actually use the Latinized version of the Greek word physis, from which we also derive the word “physics”. As is happens, physis is one of the most important terms in Greek philosophy and ( Read more... )

There is no doubt that the Heart Sutra is the most frequently used and recited text in the entire Mahayana Buddhist tradition, which still flourishes in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, Mongolia, Bhutan, China, parts of India and Nepal, and, more recently, also in the Americas and Europe. Many people have said many different things about what the ( Read more... )

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States has detected gravitational waves for the first time. This is one of the most important astrophysical observations since the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background ( Read more... )

While we don't know precisely how life got its start on Earth, most scientists accept what's called the "RNA world" hypothesis, which posits that RNA molecules kickstarted the process by acting as both catalysts and genetic material. This does, however, leave an awkward question: how did proteins get involved ( Read more... )

The best evidence yet for the existence of a new type of particle called a pentaquark has been unveiled by physicists working on the LHCb experiment on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Containing five bound quarks, pentaquarks were first predicted to exist in the late 1970s, and evidence for their existence emerged from several labs in the ( Read more... )

You don’t really exist in the way that you think you do, so you are constantly trying to secure your existence. You are like a blue cheese, which tries to maintain itself by continually growing more mold, until the mold consumes the cheese, which dissolves into nothingness, a pile of moldy dust. We are not one wholesome, whole entity at all. We ( Read more... )

"Who doubts that he lives, and remembers, and understands, and wills, and thinks, and knows, and judges? For indeed even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he doubts; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he knows that he does not know; if he doubts, he judges that he ought not to give his consent rashly. ( Read more... )