I once spent an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon. It was an infernally hot…

I recently got an email from an anthropologist commenting on a new report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The topic of that report was Bigfoot—or rather, a genetic analysis…

At the end of the smash Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, the protagonist, Elder Price, a zealous young Mormon missionary in Uganda, triumphantly sings, “We are still Latter…

A physicist and a philosopher walk into a lab… no, this isn’t the start of a joke. It’s an everyday occurrence in the lab of Andrew Briggs, Professor of Nanomaterials at Oxford…

I remember my grandfather commenting—wry amusement tinged with grim resignation—that what made him finally feel old was seeing his children reach middle age. I was a child then.…

Click on the image above for slideshow.It’s 6:45 on a Tuesday morning as Ulrike, a feisty Berliner in her early 50s whose dyed strawberry blonde hair whispers hints of gray, climbs…

Where does the world begin and where does it end? In many creation stories the Earth has well-defined edges. In early Mesopotamian mythology it is a flat disk floating in the ocean…

The Scottish philosopher David Hume was in many ways an enemy of the unlikely. The quintessential empiricist of his age, Hume’s 1748 treatise, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,…

That human beings can be mistaken in anything they think or do is a proposition known as fallibilism. Stated abstractly like that, it is seldom contradicted. Yet few people have ever…

To call David Deutsch a physicist is both completely accurate and woefully incomplete. Certainly, his work has sparked at least one vibrant subfield of physics. But, as he explained…