Michael Dowd calls himself an "evolutionary evangelist."  He's developing a number of pretty solid concepts that help reconcile mythic spirituality with naturalistic worldviews.

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This fascinating history tells the epic of the evolution of the brain, from the earliest multicellular organisms to homonids and on into the future of humanity.  Why are our brains shrinking?  The story concludes with some hypotheses about why the millions-of-years-long trend of increasing brain size is now reversing in humans.

A brief history of ( Read more... )

Findings from CERN show that neutrinos can travel faster than light.  This overturns one of the key fundamentals of Einstein's theory of relativity.

Particles found to break speed of light   Yahoo! News

Some intriguing ideas in Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer's project:

Aristotle refers to human slaves as 'animated property'. The phrase exactly describes the current status of nonhuman animals. Human slavery
therefore presents an enlightening parallel to this situation. We shall explore this parallel in order to single out a past response to human ( Read more... )

Richard Dawkins finds religion incurious:

in·cu·ri·ous. adj  \in-ˈkyu̇r-ē-əs\. Definition of INCURIOUS. : lacking a normal or usual curiosity : uninterested incurious stare>.

--Miriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Squashing curiosity with dogma, Dawkins finds religion a crime against childhood.

Perhaps he should explore beyond the dogma of the the ( Read more... )

Holy crap.

Electric motor made from a single molecule    BBC News

New research shows that dolphins appear to grieve the dead, and may treat differently those who die suddenly and those who die of prolonged illness.

Death in dolphins: Do you they understand they are mortal?   New Scientist

This is a very interesting series on the science behind mental self-healing techniques, from meditation and postive thinking to hypnosis and having a sense of purpose.

Heal thyself: The power of mind over matter    New Scientist

Results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been making it less likely that string theory, which promised to explain dark matter, the Higgs Boson particle, and other quirks of the subatomic world, is an accurate description of the universe.  Specifically, researchers have failed to find evidence for supersymmetry.

LHC results put ' ( Read more... )

The chip mimicks the neurons and synapses of the human brain, and has the ability to learn new tricks.

IBM unveils microchip based on the human brain New Scientist